Gender equality in sports is the right thing to do but may not be practicable under the current social dispensation. In some cases, the right thing to do is impossible to do right, a good example being when gender parity issues correlate with economic issues. Almost every sports-related administrator, promoter, and manager would want to see gender parity and equality exercised in sporting activities but the same may not be possible currently. The world is gradually working towards a time when full gender equality can be achieved in sporting activities. Attaining gender equality in the instant context means men and women teams being treated equally for all practical purposes. Sporting activities have in the modern times become purely commercial activities with most of the decisions being made based on pecuniary considerations. The modern societal approach to sports does not support gender equality (Wagner et al., 2015). The combination of social and economic considerations thus makes it unviable to implement gender equality in sports. As long as sports lovers do not consider men’s sports as equal to women sports, it will not be possible for gender equality to be implemented in sports.
Modern sporting has becomes commercialized in nature with most decision-making being based on money, a fact which compromises the ability to implement gender equality in sports. For example, in college sports, many universities and colleges spend fortunes to build competitive teams to represent the school in competitions. Among the expenses includes giving scholarships to talented athletes, hiring coaches and maintaining teams (Mangrum, 2014). It is worthy of notice that these institutions only make this investment because they anticipate a return on the same. The same approach is applied in commercial sporting activities where professional teams spend fortunes hiring players, training them, and strategizing for matches. Just as with any other business, the teams invest in a manner that will not only bring about a return on investment but also make a profit. It might be argued that factoring finances in sports is a wrong approach in itself. However, it would be correct to say that currently, money is the only reason that most sporting activities exist. In many parts of the world, sports activities that cannot generate finances have continued to peter out whereas sports activities that generate money thrive. There is a direct correlation between the existence of a sporting activity and its ability to make money. Based on current sporting culture, male teams present a better return on investment than female teams hence it is impossible for teams to invest in men teams in the same way that they invest in female teams.
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The money-making abilities of sporting teams mainly depend on the ability to attract viewers and currently, male teams attract more viewers than female teams. The greatest sporting tournament in the history of the world is the FIFA World Cup, a good example being the 2018 edition to be held in Moscow. Almost everyone will not recognize the fact that the statement above is wrong due to a manifest ambiguity. The tournament to be held in Russia in June 2018 is the Men’s edition of the FIFA World Cup as there is also a women’s edition. The men’s edition is, however, normally just referred to as the World Cup since Women’s edition pales in comparison (Bodenner, 2015). The paling of the women’s edition is not a fault of FIFA but rather of football fans. Billions of people around the world will be glued to TV’s watching every single match of the FIFA world cup while most of them do not even know where the last women’s edition was held and who won it. The higher viewership attracts advertisers thus making money for all the stakeholders involved (Wagner et al., 2015). The FIFA world cup example is relocated in almost all other sporting activities from hockey, basketball to volleyball. The teams with the higher viewership attract more revenues and thus more money. As long as the general community manifest a bias towards male sports, there will be more money for male sports than there is in female sports (Kenschaft, Clark & Ciambrone, 2015). With there being more money in male sports than female sports, it will not be possible for sports administrators to operationalize gender equality in sports. Even those sports administrators who favor gender equality will be unable to implement the ideal due to pecuniary considerations.
A contrary opinion will argue that gender equality is the right thing in all perspectives hence the application of gender equality in sports activities should not be debatable as it is the right thing to do. Under this argument, gender equality should be implemented in all sporting activities, more so at the academic level with no reference to pecuniary considerations (Kenschaft, Clark & Ciambrone, 2015). The instant argument would be based on the contention that academic sporting should not have pecuniary considerations and sports should be undertaken as a social activity. Under this argument, it is ethically wrong and demeaning to consider a women’s coach as inferior to a men’s coach by paying the women’s coach less than the men’s coach. For example, the average male head coach at Ohio State University (OSU) is $835,752 per year while the average salary for a female head coach at OSU is $175,814 per year (EADA, 2018). The salary disparity happens in spite of the fact that the OSU female teams are more successful than male teams in almost every discipline. Based on the instant argument, OSU and almost other institutions are liable for reprehensible gender-based discrimination and should be admonished. Theoretically, it would be impossible to dispute this argument and it would also be possible that legally, the female coaches would have a good discrimination cause of action in a court of law. However, there are no theoretical sporting activities as all games, college or otherwise, are practical in nature. If OSU decided to pay their women coaches as much as they pay their male coaches, the women teams would become unmanageable and would soon be eliminated. Similarly, of OSU sought to pay its men’s teach coaches as little as they pay their women’s teach coaches, then the University would never find a competent coach to employ and anyone they would find would soon be pirated by another team. Gender equality remains the right thing to do but cannot yet be done practically in the modern times.
From the totality of the above, it is clear without peradventure that implementing gender equality in sports is the right thing but cannot be attained under the current social environment. Under the current social environment, male sports activities are preferred over female sports activities in terms of popularity and viewership. The popularity and viewership discrepancies ensure that male sports make exponentially more money than female sports. The pecuniary impact above then trickles down to how male and female players and coaches are treated from a school level and also at a professional level. It cannot be said that the discrepancy in itself amounts to gender-based discrimination. After all, a female coach of a male team will still get higher pay than a male coach of a female team. The inability to implement gender equality in sporting activities is thus not a means of gender-based discrimination but rather sporting activities seeking to adapt to the current social environment. Over and above seeking to adopt, inability to implement gender equality is an effort by sports teams to survive in the current social environment as an effort to change would kill the teams and not change the environment. Unless and until the social environment changes, gender equality cannot be implemented in sports.
References
Bodenner, C. (2015, June 09). Why aren't women's sports as big as men's? your thoughts. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/women-and-sports-world-cup-soccer/395231/
EADA. (2018). Equity in athletics. Equity in athletics data analysis . Retrieved from https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/institution/details
Kenschaft, L., Clark, R., & Ciambrone, D. (2015). Gender inequality in our changing world: A comparative approach . New York: Routledge
Mangrum, B. (2014, March 27). Is college football profitable for universities? Retrieved from http://www.ethosreview.org/intellectual-spaces/is-college-football-profitable/
Wagner, C., Garcia, D., Jadidi, M., & Strohmaier, M. (2015, April). It's a man's Wikipedia? Assessing gender inequality in an online Encyclopedia. In ICWSM (pp. 454-463)
