Female Athletes Should Be Paid Essay

662 Words3 Pages

A green ball slams on two different courts. A ponytail flicks around on one, but only a few people are in her stands — the same ball and court are used in every game, but female athletes are still paid less. Our community needs to be more aware of the wage gap in sports; female athletes need to be paid more.

Women have been denied of their involvement in sports for centuries. This has created a delusion that women in sports are inferior, even though David Berri, a professor of economics, says that “More than 40% of sports fans… [and] athletes in high school and college sports are… women.” As athletes and fans, women like me do make an impact on sports. During 7th grade, my friends and I would eagerly watch cricket on the TV and argue about …show more content…

Women in sports are regarded as amusing and sensitive and are discredited for the hard work that they put into athletics. As a student-athlete, every time I tell my classmates that I won, or even did well, in a sport, they remind me that I am a girl, so the game must have been super easy. I don’t try any less or get injured more than my male classmates, but I am just treated like I do. Whenever I bring up female sports, the people around me laugh, as if supporting hard-working athletes is funny. No matter how much skill any woman has in sports, our achievements are easily extinguished by the illogical stereotypes about females in sports. Without even experiencing any games, society assumes that women can not play sports, and pays them accordingly. Based on this theory that men in sports are better than women, the United States men’s soccer team’s salary budget, according to Adelphi university, is a whopping 4,250,000 dollars more than the United States women’s …show more content…

Studies have also shown that women are capable enough in sports to even outperform men. Clearvue Health states that “[w]omen recover from exhaustion faster and with more of their strength.” Compared to men, women had 26% more “...power available 3 minutes after muscle exhaustion.” This evidence clearly supports the idea that women are equally as talented as men in sports, and should be paid as equally.

It is common knowledge that female athletes are paid drastically less for their work than the male athletes playing the same game. This problem is pushed off as a revenue issue but is really the effect of the underlying problem of misogyny in our world. Team funding is separate from profits gained from sports, which are earned from the viewers that watch them. When women in sports give the same, if not more, effort than male athletes do, why are there still fewer viewers? Why is watching and supporting our hard-working athletes