Written by With the month of March being celebrated as Women’s History Month in the United States, what could be a more appropriate topic of discussion than the disparity in professional sports between male and female pro athletes?
You would be hard pressed to find someone who is not familiar with any of the four major professional sports leagues in North America, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, and Major League Soccer, the one professional association that is not nearly as widely known or recognized as the other leagues. However, there is one thing all of these professional sports associations have in common: all of their athletes are male. These leagues also have some of the highest paid athletes in professional sports with the biggest product endorsements, most media coverage, and have the highest propensity for turning retired athletes into sports analysts and/or broadcasters.
So where are the women? Well, let’s see. There is the Women’s National Basketball Association, founded in 1996, with an average player salary of $72,000, and only 12 teams compared to their male counterpart which has more than double the teams and vastly higher player salaries. There is also the National Women’s Soccer League, founded in 2012, and fields 10 teams, versus Major League Soccer which hosts almost three times the number of teams. For our hockey fans, we have the National Women’s Hockey League (something I personally was not aware of until just this week), founded in 2015, and which has a fifth of the NHL’s 31 teams. When it comes to playing on a diamond, there is the National Pro Fastpitch, a revived version of the former Women’s Pro Softball League, was established in 2004 and currently has a total of five teams, compared to the 30 in Major League Baseball. Lastly, for our fans of the “pigskin,” there is the Women’s Football Alliance, founded in 2009, that boasts a hearty 63 total teams, more than double what the NFL features.
Culture in Sports’ Denise Harvey posted last week about women being trivialized in sports when compared to their male counterparts, particularly with respect to professional tennis. When you look at the wide disparity and lack of recognition when it comes to professional sports leagues, the trivialization is even more so. With the smaller leagues, the WFA being the exception to this, lower average salaries, fewer games played per season, and noticeably absent media coverage, it’s obvious that we as a society have yet to accept women athletes as being on par with men.
You may be asking, “How can we change this, Matt?” Honestly, in my personal opinion, we, as a culture can start at the very lowest levels: T-ball baseball, Pee-wee football, and so on. If we insist on opening these up to boys and girls, and continue to encourage them to play these sports as they get older, we can potentially erase the need for there to be separate and unequal leagues. I understand that there are always going to be those naysayers who will point out the physical differences between the genders when it comes to strength and ability, but those are things that can be taught and trained, and still allow people to be people. Just because a woman is strong and can play a full-contact professional sport like football or hockey, does not mean she is going to look like her male counterparts.
When we can start celebrating athletes for their abilities, and pay them accordingly, we will begin to move beyond this disparity. This is a cultural shift I feel is long overdue, much like when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball back in 1947.My advice would also be to go out, find your local women’s professional sports teams, support them in any way possible, in a safe, socially distanced manner, encourage the young girls and women you know to continue to play whatever sports they want, and never let them be discouraged by someone who tells them they cannot play because they are not male.