Our Biased Culture is Hindering Women in Sports

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Our Biased Culture is Hindering Women in Sports

Only recently have women been able to compete in a very public way, with established leagues, payrolls and plenty of endorsement opportunities. Title IX has allowed teams of girls for almost every sport as well as better opportunities for sports scholarships to college and many other privileges only given to boys for their talents in sports. Under all these legal provisions and establishments for the encouragement of women in sports, women should now really be able to do any kind of sport they want in as much freedom as is afforded to men in sports.

Although women have been given so many freedoms in this field, it is the social aspect, the audiences of sports, the people of our biased culture that is now hindering women who wish to be known as athletes and competitors. Our culture is filled with deeply imbedded ideas about power and strength and competition being masculine qualities, and for women to want to embody these things is confusing and goes against our unconscious stereotypes about the abilities and attributes of men versus women. The acceptance of women in sports becomes not a matter of ability of talent in their field, but rather is based on ways women can be what is considered by our culture to be feminine while they play their sport. If a woman can still be what the average person thinks of as a woman while also displaying talent, her "masculine" attributes can be more accepted by the audience and so the woman is more accepted.

There has long been a stigma of strong women as masculine, base, somehow not as good and pure a character as more demure, quiet, passive women. In sport, women cannot help but show their aggression and competitiveness just as men do in ...

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... society, than can digressing from these roles harm the society? The problem with the situation is that culture and social mores rarely take into account freedoms of the individual and the choices individual make. There are many women who truly want to get married and stay at home with their children and devote themselves to the needs of theirs husbands and children. However, there may be just as many women who want to get jobs or live in unorthodox familial situations or play sports. It may take time for these desires to also be generally acceptable by our society, but what is needed is not change but flexibility. If more people can understand that people need to do what they think is right and set goals which they can work hard to accomplish, then people may be less likely to persecute each other about life paths dictated by the individual rather than by society.

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