The 2018 Winter Olympics ends in four days, but the institution inequitably dividing male and female sports persists.
Even domestically, we see this divide.
The Women’s U.S. soccer team filed a federal complaint toward U.S. Soccer for wage discrimination in 2016. The maximum salary for female basketball players after at least six years in the WNBA was only $107,000, compared to the NBA average salary of $4,500,000.
Women are completely excluded athletically from the NFL, which generates billions of dollars in revenue each year. Distilling the explanation for this gender disparity to greater viewership in male sports compared to female sports oversimplifies the issue.
We need to stop reiterating the myth that we watch male-dominated sports because men have more physical ability or are more entertaining. We watch these sports because of the institution that has built up male sports over the last century.
The argument that the difference in compensation for male and female athletes can be attributed to “just physiology” doesn’t take into account the complicated history of the exclusion of women in society or the economic inequality women have faced in the workforce since forever.
A counterargument during this Olympic season may be that female gymnastics and figure skating are some of the most popular Olympics sports in the U.S. These sports are not watched, however, because they are necessarily appreciated for their intense – often brutal – physical demands. They are more often viewed because they are spectacles and capitalize on female gender roles of elegance and frivolous costumes.
The Olympics are an event that consumes the minds of almost every country in the world. We have to be critical of why certain sports are highlighted more than others, and why we are trained to be intrigued by those sports.
