Stigmas In Women's Sports

Since the 1800’s society as a whole has not considered women to be equal to men. Women still regularly experience gender inequality, negative stereotyping, social prejudice, sexism and discrimination in numerous areas such as education, human rights, career paths including the gender wage gap and career opportunities and in sports. Society has created a prejudice in their definition of female versus male sports. For example, baseball and football are considered sports that men play. Society has pigeonholed women into participating in sports such as softball and swimming. Often, there is not even a consideration that women could have the talent or capability to compete with their male athletic counterparts. The Olympics were created in

To this day there are still discriminatory comments made by coaches, managers, and support staff. Because of this, there has been a rapid decrease of professional female athletes continuing their athletic careers, as well as with female students cutting their sporting careers short. The Famuan researched that, “The Women’s Sports Foundation says that by the age of 14, girls drop out of sports at two times the rate of boys. An additional survey shows that 51 percent of women quit playing sports by the age of 17”. Many women and girls no longer view sports as a solid and comfortable career opportunity. There are constant social stigmas in women’s sports, such as women not able to throw as hard or accurate as a man or there is no way a woman could slam dunk a basketball. There have been multiple surveys that reveal girls don't think they are worthy enough of reaching the professional level, as well as feeling the constant worry of being judged. An article by Women's In Sports states, “Women in Sport has found that more than one million teenage girls (43%) who once considered themselves ‘sporty’, disengage from sports following primary school. A fear of feeling judged by others (68%), lack of confidence (61%), pressures of schoolwork (47%) and not feeling safe outside (43%) were some of the reasons given for not wanting to participate for this group of girls”. With a decreasing amount of younger girls participating in sports and women playing sports in college, there is a lack of general participation in women's professional sports today and there is a concern of no participation in the