Once a male-dominated culture, the world of sports has now seen the emergence of female-dominant games such as softball and ringette.
However, women’s softball was taken out of the summer Olympics in 2012 due to the undefeated reputation of the United States’ team. The same threats have been made to women’s hockey due to the undefeated nature of the Canadian team.
Women are now gaining a stronger hold in sports, but equal representation between the genders still has a way to go.
History of her sports story
Jessica Dunkin, a Carleton University history instructor, said sports culture dates back to the 19th century.
“A greater amount of people had the money and time to engage in organized sport, so we start to see the codification of sport,” she said.
Much of the gender discrepancy and male prevalence in sport was due to women’s social roles as housewives and mothers, according to Dunkin. She said this linked “a sort of sporting prowess and capability to men.”
While women were not completely deterred from engaging in sports, she said it was still more conventional for men to be involved within the sporting community.
“Late 19th century, early [20th] century, we see an image of robust, healthy womanhood,” she said. “This is still linked to motherhood, of having good and healthy babies.”
These ideas stemmed from a eugenics argument, Dunkin said—a concern that the white middle class was at risk of being overrun by working and immigrant classes.
But later in the 1950s, Dunkin said successful female athletes were being perceived as a “paragon of femininity and domesticity.”
Dunkin cited the example of locally-born champion figure skater Barbara Ann Scott, an athlete dubbed “Canada’s Sweetheart.”
“Barbara Ann Scott was constantly being photographed in domestic scenes . . . even though she was quite younger,” she said. “Part of that was sort of a larger culture of domesticity that was very prominent in the 1950s in response to anxieties of the Cold War. The home was the antidote to all that was wrong.”
While changes have been made in terms of women’s funding and coverage, Dunkin said there still remain issues with gender equality in sports as a whole.
“We’ve seen sort of peaks and valleys in terms of women’s involvement with sport,” she said. “My sense is that we’re not at a peak in this moment.”
Masculine versus feminine
Stephanie MacKay, a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton, said the gender gap in sporting communities stems from societal culture.
“The biggest issue with gender in the media in terms of sports context is the very narrow ways in which sports are represented,” she said. “I think football we would still consider to be a masculine sport. Something like synchronized swimming . . . we would think of as a feminine sport.”
When female athletes participate in sports perceived as being masculine, Dunkin said there is an association with lesbian culture, while the reverse is associated with gay culture, and these perceptions are not innate.
“No sport is inherently feminine or masculine, they’re entirely social constructions,” she said.
She referred to the shifting culture around figure skating as example. It was initially associated with upper class masculinity, she said. It later changed, becoming a sport associated with femininity, making for an attempt to “re-masculinize” the sport in the 1990s.
Champion Canadian figure skater Elvis Stojko, nicknamed “The Terminator,” donned leather clothing and openly talked about women in an attempt to disassociate himself from labels of being effeminate, she noted.
At the recent Olympics, he also criticized male skaters who didn’t land quads, a jump that he said sets men apart in the skating world, Dunkin stated.
“I think sport serves to sort of reinforce existing presumptions about men, traits already associated with men,” she said.
The Carleton sports scoop
Shelley Coolidge, head coach of the Carleton women’s hockey team, said there are more supporters coming out to the university’s men’s hockey games than the women’s.
“The culture that’s been created is one that more people are more comfortable going to the men’s games than the women’s games,” she said.
However, Coolidge said the difference between Carleton’s men’s and women’s basketball teams’ fan bases is reasonable.
“I will say a program like the men’s basketball that has won 10 [championships] has gotten the privilege to be covered and honoured,” she said.
Taffe Charles, head coach of Carleton’s women’s basketball team, agreed.
“What they’ve done is really quite remarkable and that’s what drives the media agenda in general. If we won 10-12 championships we’d be out there as well,” he said.
Charles said a gap in funding women’s university teams, especially Carleton’s, has been filled within the last 10-20 years.
“It’s definitely being taken seriously. We’ve seen that by hiring full time coaches on the women’s program, definitely a lot more intention being put into it,” he said. “It does take time, but there has been quite a big investment.”
Ultimately, Charles said sports popularity isn’t about gender, but about team success.
Gender representation in the Olympics
In February 2014, both Canada’s men’s and women’s hockey teams brought back Olympic gold medals from the Sochi winter games.
Coolidge said the men’s team received more media attention because of the public’s familiarity with the male athletes with players like Sidney Crosby, who bears a household name. She said friends of hers would ask how to pronounce the last name of female hockey player and Olympic flag bearer Hayley Wickenheiser.
Madison Charney, a 19-year-old who will be competing in the women’s skeleton in Pyeongchang’s 2018 Olympics, said gender issues have been overcome in her sport.
Charney competes in skeleton, which was offered exclusively for men in the 1928 and 1948 Olympics. Skeleton then reappeared at the 2002 Salt Lake City games and 2014 games for both genders, according to the Sochi 2014 website.
Leading up to the next games, Charney said she is training six to seven days a week, treating the sport like a full-time job. She said she trains with a group of three male athletes and another female.
“Our training program is basically the same but of course [the men] can lift more and do more hills,” Charney said. “I think we’re on the same training schedule, same program, and I think my coach does a good thing at keeping us equal.”
But Charney said she does see favouritism made towards male athletes when it comes to grants and funding.
Media coverage today
There is still a discrepancy within media portrayal of male and female athletes, MacKay said.
This is based on a question of the quantity versus quality of women’s sports coverage in the media, where she said writing and photography done for sports features are an example of how both genders are reported on differently.
“You open the article and there’s a woman at home with her kids and she’s an athlete, and when you open a similar page to a male athlete, you see him shooting a three-pointer,” she said.
While there are pieces that focus on men’s human interest stories, she said they tend to stick to generalized representations of masculinity due to societal expectations, and a desire to stay within the norms of socially applied gender roles.
But she said men shouldn’t feel compelled to conform to a single perception.
“There should be a range, men representing different areas of masculinity,” MacKay said. “Men, particularly 45 and up, are quite happy to see where men are shown in a different light, not just a hyper-competitive.”
She said she believes media coverage will change.
More women are also entering sports newsrooms and making changes, just by their presence there, she said.
A rejection of traditional coverage and search for alternative ones is also being made possible with the Internet.
“A lot of people are turning away from this,” she said. “Women are going online and finding groups that are producing media that is . . . different than what we see on mainstream media.”
