COLUMN: Female athletes deserve more respect
“I’m sorry,” my male friend of a year said to me after blocking my shot during a pickup basketball game.
Those words don’t seem like much, and perhaps they even seem nice. I promise you, though, that as a female athlete hearing these words is very degrading.
Why is it that he said these words to me but would never say them to another guy after blocking his shot? Why is it that guys are embarrassed to block a girl’s shot but take pride in blocking another guy’s shot?
The answer to these questions is that female athletes just aren’t as respected as male athletes.
I had to come to this realization early on in my athletic career.
Even if I put in many more hours to my game and evidently had better skills than one of my male teammates, he always seemed to receive the ball more than I did. I just couldn’t fathom why he got more touches.
However, I knew the answer was that I was a girl. I’m sure many professional female athletes have had these same feelings on their way to the top.
The fact is that female athletes deserve more respect than they receive now.
We can see that female athletics receive less support by examining collegiate athletics.
According to the NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report, Division I athletics had 11,000 more male athletes than female athletes.
The ratio of female to male athletes should be equal, but what makes matters worse is that female athletics receive much less funding than male athletics. This means they cannot expand their programs.
According to the NCAA Gender Equity Report, female athletes receive only 45 percent of collegiate athletic scholarships. Female athletic collegiate programs also receive $1.55 billion less for operating costs than male programs and $50 million less for recruiting purposes.
Truly, it’s sad because female athletes just don’t receive the same chance as male athletes, and even when a female makes it to be a professional athlete, she is still not treated equal.
According to a study at Adelphi University, WNBA players on average make $72,000 a year, which is only 1.6 percent of what their male counterparts make.
Even worse, the U.S. women’s national soccer team—a team that won the Olympics in 2008 and 2012 and the World Cup in 2011 and 2015 while the men’s team has never received either title—had to sue the federal government to earn a higher pay. According to the lawsuit, the men were paid four times as much as the women. Yet, this women’s team made over $5 million in profit during the 2017 year while the guy’s team ran a million-dollar deficit according to the U.S. Soccer budget report.
The question I have is when will these professional athletes finally gain the respect they deserve?
Even more relatable, when will I or any other girl who wants to go down to the Student Activity Center here at Central Michigan University and play a pickup basketball game feel as if they will not be laughed at for wanting to join in a game with all guys?
I’m not naïve. I know this won’t happen tomorrow or the next day or even the day after that. I just hope that by the time I have a daughter, she won’t have to have these same feelings that I have.
