Women's Inequality In Sports Essay

Women often do not have the same opportunities in athletics as men do, due to inequality in professional athletics, objectification, and the gender pay gap. Many strong women continue to fight every day to be treated and accepted the same way men are in athletics. From not even being allowed to participate in sporting events, and fighting for equitable uniforms, to opposing equal pay as professional athletes. There are many injustices regarding women’s athletics.

Women have only been allowed to compete in the Olympics since 1896 (with many limitations), and the first Olympics was in 776 B.C. That's a long time since women could not compete in sports at the same level as men. In the 1940s, the first women’s professional sports league was formed

1896 was the very beginning of the women’s rights movement in the US. The women’s rights movement helped establish more equality in many different aspects of society, such as jobs and sports. However, the fight isn't over.

Women have fewer opportunities in professional sports than men do. Women can play in the NFL because there is no rule against them doing so. However, as of 2022, no women have ever been signed to a team. It is harder for them to even be considered by coaches, because they are sometimes seen as inferior to men. As another example, in the 2022 Olympics, women swam the 1500m freestyle, an event that had been formerly only for men. Katie Ledecky won this event with a time of 15 minutes and 8 seconds. This was a huge milestone for women’s equality in sports because this event had never been available for women before 2022. As a third example, starting in the 1968 Olympics women who

There are many instances in which women are forced to wear uniforms that do not help their performance in their sport but rather distract from it. In 2021 at the European Beach Handball Championship, the Norwegian women’s beach handball team was fined 150 euros per player for refusing to wear the required bikini bottoms of their uniforms. The women viewed them as exposing and impractical. The team even gave the officials a warning ahead of time that they would be wearing shorts instead of bikini bottoms. The rules state that men must wear shorts that fall no more than 10 centimeters above their knees, but the case is different for women. The opposite problem occurs as well. In the 1990s the US women’s Olympic soccer team had to wear ill-fitting hand-me-down uniforms from the men’s team because the sponsors had only made them with men in mind. These uniforms posed unnecessary distractions for the players. In another instance, in 2012 the Badminton world federation tried (unsuccessfully) to force women to wear skirts while playing with the excuse of wanting them to “look feminine and have a nice