Women Belong on the Court
Image by Viktoria Slowikowska
If we’re being honest, women have always gotten the short end of the stick.
We have been fighting for gender equality for over a century and every time we take a small step forward, there seems to be giant step back looming behind us. All across the world, protests, marches, and conversations have occurred begging for women’s rights and equality. Even a global pandemic couldn’t silence us.
This fight has highlighted a new issue: disparities in sports. It’s never been a secret that men’s sports get more coverage, more air time, more funding, and overall more support. Women’s sports teams are just as powerful, talented and skilled, but are treated like the ugly stepsister.
March Madness was front and center this year when talking about the distinction between men’s and women’s sports. While the men’s March Madness tournament took place in Indianapolis with lavish weight rooms and extensive gift sets for players, the women’s tournament in San Antonio had weight rooms that consisted of yoga mats and a couple light weights.
Oregon Ducks basketball player Sedona Prince showed the basically empty weight room with minimal options in a TikTok, calling for action. The NCAA responded apologizing for the lack of equipment and blamed it on spacing, promising they were working to address this urgently. Athletes called their bluff on the spacing issue, showing the nearly empty half of where practice courts were. Shortly after all of the commotion, a comparable weight room was set up for the women’s teams, but only after concerns from players and fans across the nation.
The weight room is just one instance in where female athletes are treated as less than compared to their male counterparts. Professional female teams across the nation are constantly subjected to a pay disparity and are paid significantly less than their accompanying male teams. One of the most notable teams to take a stand against this was the women’s U.S. soccer team back in May 2019. The World Cup-winning team sued U.S. soccer for years of unequal treatment and unfair compensation and were struck down nearly a year later.
Female athletes have been subjected to unequal treatment for decades and are continuously speaking out about it. These athletes aren’t getting equal funding or air time in comparison to men, even while women’s sports are continuing to grow. Women’s sports, while making up nearly 40% of all sports participants, only receive 4% of sports media coverage according to a study by the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota.
While victories have been small, like a weight room, we are still moving forward. Women have been fighting for a right to be heard and be present for years, and women’s sports are calling for change.
The weight room disparity at this year’s NCAA March Madness tournament was just the tip of the iceberg. Prince’s viral TikTok started a movement and got thousands of people talking about the gender discrimination in sports. As Prince put it, if you’re not upset by this, you are part of the problem.
By Emma Bittner
Rom-Com fanatic and coffee connoisseur with a little bit of "I wanna save the world" in me.