When it was enacted on June 23, 1972, Title IX was the greatest thing ever to happen to girls’ and women’s sports in America.
The law, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs or activities that are eligible for federal financial assistance, was created to ensure that American girls have equal opportunities in school sports. Although it was inconsistently applied, and many have pointed to racial disparities, the law worked. It transformed the United States into a unrivaled incubator for female athletic talent. American women have won enough medals at the Olympics to be able to claim enough gold for themselves to be ranked among the top nations. The law has also had a profound impact on the lives of generations of American women. A survey showed that 9 out 10 female C-suite executive were female. athletes in school.
Title IX was, in some ways though, a Pyrrhic victory. Despite its many successes, Title IX has not allowed women and girls to excel on terms that are independent of men and boys. Like so much in our culture, sports are still based on a male model — a man’s body, a man’s interests. Women are left competing against men in mainstream sports because they have a different model of success.
Fifty years after Title IX’s enactment, we have an opportunity to reimagine women’s sports altogether. If we accept that women’s bodies are not holistically inferior to men’s but rather fundamentally different, we have to value female athletes and women’s sports on their own terms.
What would it look like? I propose a New Deal for women’s sports — with a women-first approach. This must go beyond creating entitlements or enforcing equality, as Title IX does. We must eliminate the systemic grandfathered advantages that male athletes enjoy and the male-dominated sport infrastructures. We must encourage women to enjoy other sports, those that they excel in and even rule. We must also broaden our definitions of athletic prowess.
A New Deal for women’s sports would bring more women into leadership roles — in coaching, management and media. It would expand investment in women’s sports categorically. It will increase sponsorship opportunities for athletic and other brands. It would transform the broadcasting and coverage of women’s sports, elevating female sports journalists and improving the quantity and quality of reporting on women’s sports. Women’s sports would be built for women, with athletic feats that suit our bodies.
Men’s bodies are different from women’s; men are generally bigger, faster and stronger. And currently, the sports that make the most money and see the largest audiences in the United States are suited to a male body’s physical strengths: football tackles, basketball dunks. Sports built for women’s bodies would be different. Women have greater flexibility and resilience than men. Women excel at enduring.
So let’s start with a paradigm shift. It’s because of our culture that a slam-dunk is better than triple axels or a home run is more exciting than a sprint at mile end. Women’s sports have only a fraction of the overall viewership and revenue of men’s sports, but men’s sports are not inherently more exciting or fun to watch than women’s are. The joy and beauty of a sport is subjective, not objective.
More than a third of Americans voted football their favorite sport in 2017. Each fall, Americans stick to their screens to catch the game. Is the male-dominated game of football any more compelling than the less gendered soccer? That’s a sport the rest of the world seems to enjoy much more than Americans do, and it’s one in which American professional women’s teams win more on the international stage than our men’s teams.
Part of the problem is the way we think about sports is a vestige of our fixation on nationalism and military strength — spheres that men also have dominated. The pull-ups, push-ups, and push-ups of Presidential Fitness Test were part of traditional American public school physical education. This was in response to Cold War fears that we weren’t producing enough combat-ready American men. The sports events we stage today continue to pantomime militarism and war — complete with societally enforced adherence to prescribed behavior during the national anthem. Americans tend to view strength as a male trait. Our sports show our strength.
Women who can penetrate the male-dominated world of athletic power are often lavishly praised. The college football and soccer player Sarah Fuller, for example, gained far more attention by kicking for Vanderbilt’s winless men’s team and becoming the first woman to play and score in a Power 5 football game than she did for being a goalie on Vanderbilt’s conference-winning women’s soccer team. I worry that these alleged success stories could be a distraction. These women are not scalable models, but exceptions. This is why they grab our attention.
When Fuller took to the field to kick for the football team, her helmet was triumphantly inscribed, “Play like a girl.” It was an inspiring moment, but it didn’t last long. She was invited to play because the team was out of options: The school doesn’t have a Division I men’s soccer team to draw from, and coronavirus restrictions had left the football team without a man to do the job. It was back to normal after the two games with Fuller.
If the only arena that matters is the male athletic environment, women are almost certain to fail and their achievements in female-dominated arenas will be ignored. Sports don’t just reflect our culture and its biases; they reaffirm it. Is this really what we want “playing like a girl” to mean?
Meanwhile, many sports in which women excel on their own terms — gymnastics, distance running, skiing — draw large audiences when they are broadcast at international competitions such as the Olympics, but their stars generally lack the opportunities for gigantic league salaries or lucrative brand sponsorships that male athletes have. The tennis star Naomi Osaka is the world’s top-paid female athlete, but she has 18 men ahead of her. Number one is Serena Williams. 31.
It is not surprising that American women win over women from other countries when it comes to sports and nationalism. They are seen as the bringers of glory to America by news outlets. Women’s soccer accounted for more than a quarter of women’s sports coverage in 2019, the year that the US women’s soccer team won the World Cup, according to one study. Those bursts in coverage historically have not translated to increased coverage of women’s sports overall. Women must be the best in order to be covered by national media.
Women are valued in figure skating and gymnastics, just as they are in the rest of society. Men are encouraged to make themselves bigger in order to play basketball or football, while women are embraced in these sports. Athletic girls are still subjected to harmful practices such as enforced weight loss, high-tech body fat scans and regimented diets so inadequate that they can damage girls’ bodies. And even as they empower, girls’ and women’s sports remain rife with abuse. Sports can make adolescence for female athletes less a rite than an event. The scars are difficult to heal.
In a world where women’s sports were valued on their own terms, training would be informed instead by a science-driven understanding of what physical fitness for women really means — with an understanding that healthy women’s bodies naturally retain more fat than men’s and that women’s long-term performance and health is contingent on their doing so. Historically, the study of women’s athleticism has been neglected; it is often tacked onto research that is largely conducted by men and largely concerns men.
Female athletes would be discouraged from extreme dieting and instead praised for their hard work, which is still sometimes the case. Regular menstrual cycles are vital for athletes’ physical and mental health. Women age and pregnancy is not viewed as a career end, but as a natural break that allows them to continue their athletic careers with the right support.
But more important than the sports themselves is our willingness to see women’s sports as opportunities for investment in their own right, not simply as derivative activities tacked on for equality’s sake.
This starts with rethinking the role of sports leadership. Ironically, while Title IX naturally boosted women’s participation as players, it sidelined them as coaches. Before Title IX, women made up more than 90 percent of head coaches on women’s college teams. Afterward, when money was pumped into women’s college sports administration, as required under Title IX rules, men took many of these now high-paying jobs, created under the auspices of a law that was meant to empower women — and by 2019, only 42 percent of Division I head coaches for women’s teams were women. Men also, of course, coach almost all men’s sports teams.
But hiring and retaining female coaches isn’t as easy as recruiting and paying them more (although those things wouldn’t hurt). Currently, the coaching model is not built to accommodate pregnancy, child care or family responsibilities, leading many women to drop out when they want to start a family — This is the time when many men are promoted to higher coaching positions. As in many workplaces, female coaches also face double standards as leaders; what’s viewed as tough but fair coaching in a man can be viewed as more problematic behavior in a woman.
A women-first approach to coaching, team administration and coaching would create flexibility and benefits to parents. It would also include recruitment of women at all levels of coaching pipeline, from the most junior to the top coach positions.
One crucial thing that would be totally different in a women-first sports model would be broadcasting and coverage of women’s sports: how much they’re shown on TV, as well as how we talk about female athletes in the media. Currently, most sports journalists and executives in the TV industry are men. They get lucrative broadcast deals for the sport they enjoy, the athletes that they feature, and themselves. This is due to outdated business models that favor men.
Baseball, a male-dominated game, has been on a steady downward spiral for over a decade. Matthew Walther recently wrote that it was a male-dominated game. The World Series audience has declined by two-thirds between 1975 and 2021, from 36 million viewers per match to 12 million on average. Cable television has enabled the league to maintain generous salaries by allowing the game to be included in bundles with other channels. These deals amount to self-fulfilling prophecies of audience interest — or even, arguably, subsidies. Simply put, we watch this fading sport because it’s what’s on television. No matter how dazzling its players are, a women’s league like the WNBA will never get ahead as long as men have better established airtime deals.
In a 2021 paper researchers reviewed 30 years of sports coverage on televised news and highlights shows and found that 80 percent omitted women’s sports. In 2019, 95 percent the sports coverage they examined focused on men. One segment that covered WNBA was more airtime for a hot dog eating contest. “Mainstream sports media works to actively build and maintain audience knowledge, interest and excitement for these men’s sports,” the study authors wrote. One of the authors put it bluntly: “Our analysis shows men’s sports are the appetizer, the main course and the dessert, and if there’s any mention of women’s sports, it comes across as begrudging ‘eat your vegetables’ without the kind of bells and whistles and excitement with which they describe men’s sports and athletes.”
There are bright spots that provide glimpses of what a female-first model of sports promotion could look like — less “eat your vegetables” than a bona fide feast. In what’s been called the Suni Effect, college gymnastics is enjoying a moment of fan appeal, driven by the Tokyo Olympics gold medalist Sunisa Lee, who is a freshman at Auburn University. Her school said it sold out every regular meet this season, and even as online ticket prices increased, more tickets to gymnastics meets were sold on the secondary market than for the university’s men’s basketball games.
This didn’t happen by accident — it took a TV network, in this case, the SEC network, which televised meets — and it took coaches who understood that to build an audience for women’s sports, they needed to rewrite the rules. This meant prioritizing entertainment (gymnastics is a spectacular show!) and community. and community (it’s not every school that can count an Olympic gold medalist as one of its own). At meets, there are many people screaming their heads, including many men.
Many of these women are driving the work: The South Carolina Gamecocks recently participated in a panel discussion. women’s basketball head coach Dawn Staley She told me that she was told by her school years ago, when she was coaching college basketball in South Carolina, that they wanted to sell tickets for her games for just a dollar. This was to show how low their expectations were for turnout. “I said, no, we’re not going to cheapen our product,” she recalled. She realized that cultivating a fan base would be crucial to her team’s success and to proving to her school it was worth investing in.
But she didn’t have any structural advantages to draw on. She would have to do it by herself. She worked with her team in building direct relationships with their fans through events, meet and greetings, and social media. They were rewarded by their loyal support and loyalty. “We are revenue producing,” she said. Now Staley has the largest turnout of any women’s college basketball team in the country — and is the first Black coach, male or female, to be a multiple NCAA champion.
But this success has yet to translate into the money that men’s leagues enjoy, once again at least in part because of bureaucratic legacies in broadcasting rights. That could change: Once current broadcasting deals expire in a few years, the women’s tournament could be worth more than $100 million a year in broadcast rights alone, according to a gender equity review of NCAA basketball last year. This could mark a turning point: investing in women’s sports based on the projected audience and revenue, not simply for the sake of equality.
Some female athletes are having great success in building their brands, even without large marketing budgets. They use the new tools available to them, including social media to reach and appeal to their fans. The new changes to NCAA endorsement rules — which allow athletes to earn money off their name, image and likeness — are a big part of this.
Opendorse reports that female student-athletes received more than a quarter in name, image, and likeness compensation as of May. March Madness revealed that the Sweet 16’s top two athletes in terms metric like engagement and social media followers were both women.
These women make their own stories and are now making a lot of money. However, this also means that they must work twice as hard and dedicate their efforts to both their game and marketing it.
Lauren Fleshman, who is writing a book about her experiences as a former professional track athlete, warned against “premature high fives” on the success of Title IX. “We still aren’t done with the primary objective of Title IX: equal opportunities,” she told me. “So many of the experiences of women and girls in sport are taboo, invisible or erased.” She added that we need to identify “the friction points between their bodies and the sports system not built for them.”
Just under 300,000 girls played high school sports in the United States when Title IX was adopted 50 years ago. Now that’s more than three million. Title IX had conditioned these girls to believe they were equal to boys on the football field. But that illusion dissolves when power or money is involved. That’s when the bulk of the athletic resources go to men, leaving the women those girls become to discover where our society’s values really lie.
We are still learning the truth about girls through sports, even as we struggle with Title IX. While we may be allowed to play, we are still not equal.
Source: NY Times