Sports play a giant role in contemporary society worldwide. But few of us pause to think about the larger questions of money, politics, race, sex, culture, and commercialization that surround sports everywhere. This course draws on the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines to give you new perspectives on the games we watch and play. It's the new and improved version of Professor Orin Starn's original "Sports and Society" for Coursera, which drew more than 40,000 students. We will focus on both popular sports like soccer (or “football,” as anyone outside America calls it), basketball, and baseball, and also lesser-known ones like mountain-climbing and fishing. You will never watch or think about sports in the same way again.
Women’s Sports Today, Part 2
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Do curso por Duke University
Sports and Society
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Na lição
Gender, Sexuality, and the Rise of Women's Sports
Conheça os instrutores
Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
Let's move now to the question of why.
Why is it that women's sports doesn't seem to have the same clout and visibility and
fame and riches attached to it that men's sports do in the world today?
And I want to begin by making a qualification or a subdistinction here.
And that subdistinction is that women actually can make tons of money and
become famous in certain kinds of sports but not in others.
And in particular, women seem to become global superstars
in sports that are individual sports.
So, think about gymnastics.
I mention Olga Korbut,
Nadia Comaneci, the many famous gymnasts since that become celebrities.
Or think about figure skating from Oksana Baiul,
to Dorothy Hamill, to Katarina Witt.
These again are athletes,
female athletes who become superstars and make a lot of money.
Or think about tennis or golf.
Serena Williams in tennis.
So you do have these very prominent, well remunerated, you know,
fabulously wealthy often, female athletes in individual sports.
Even if, even there they don't get paid quite as much and the men.
Where women's sports really doesn't seem to have had a lot of traction
Is in team sports.
Now when you think about it,
where are the famous women's sports teams that people follow?
Think about the Men's World Cup versus the Women's World Cup.
The Men's World Cup is gigantic,
the biggest mass entertainment spectacle on the planet.
The Women's World Cup has grown but it only gets a fraction of the attention.
And that's emblematic, I would say, of the fact that women's team sports seem to
really be the ones that have lagged behind and turned a lot of like growth and
popularity, at least that in numbers of fans that they attract,
numbers of viewers and interests that they attract.
So the question is, why is this?
Why is it especially women's team sports that seem to have trouble
gaining a kind of equality with men, especially in the professional ranks.
And let me give you a couple of reasons.
First of all, there has been in the history of sports,
some moments in which women's team sports have been actively discouraged.
And, there's kind of a pre-secret history of soccer.
In the 1920s, women's soccer, particularly in England and
France, was a pretty big deal.
There's this game played between an English and
French team that attracts 20,000 people in 1920.
But, the football authorities who are all male decide that's
it's really not a good idea to have women playing soccer.
In 1921 they banned organized women's soccer and these leagues are killed.
So there you have kind of an example of active suppression
of women's organized sports teams.
More complexly or adding some other dimension to this, you also don't,
with female sports teams,
you don't have these great traditions in the sense that because women's
sports teams have not had the publicity around them, you don't have these
ancient rivalries that everybody knows about that generate loyalty and passion.
So Celtics and Rangers or Real Madrid and Barça, Yankees Red Sox in baseball.
These men's teams, because of their long history and prominence become
these brands, and that adds to their aura whereas a women's sports team,
if it starts up, and really it's only since the 60s and
70s that you have women's sports in really big numbers.
So these teams are relatively new, they don't have this aura of these teams
with these history and this tradition and this weight that attracts interest.
Everybody wants to see the Real Madrid game or to see the Yankees Red Sox.
So you don't have the tradition with women's sports teams that can become
a hindrance.
There's also the issue of cultural expectations.
There's an art historian named John Berger who talks about
what he calls ways of seeing.
And we, especially in the west, are most accustomed
to looking at women and thinking about them as individuals.
Whereas with men, we're used to the idea of men doing manly things together.
Think if you go to an art gallery like Le Louvre or the National Gallery.
You'll see a lot of paintings of individual women.
Maybe the Madonna with the baby or you know the female nude.
The individual women.
But you'll go there and
you'll see a Rembrandt of you know the night watch with these soldiers together.
You'll see pictures of men in Parliament, war.
We're used to the idea of men working together and
that being something interesting and epic.
We're not so used to looking and thinking about women doing things together.
There is this kind of sexes or double standard in our ways of seeing.
So we have this idea with men's sports this is something familiar.
Men working together for a noble purpose of defeating the enemy.
The idea of women working together to defeat the enemy, that doesn't
have as much cultural purchase within the gender ideologies of our society.
And then finally, more concretely,
there's also I think around women's team sports a kind of negative feedback loop,
in the sense that there's not that much coverage of women's team sports.
And there is of certain women's individual sports,
like of the 100 meter dash in the Olympics or the figure skating or whatever.
But with team sports there's not very much media coverage.
And surprise, surprise, you don't have media coverage,
you don't have a lot of interest in women's team sports.
And it's not just, sometimes you have, you get women's team sports put on TV.
Like again the WNBA.
But it's not just a matter of putting something on TV.
It's also the question of the back story.
You know cuz we watch football or basketball games often
cuz we know something about the players and we read a blog that said so
and so is having a bad year, so and so recovered from cancer and what not.
When you don't have that media backstory, you don't have as much interest and
you're gonna get a smaller viewership for the game.
So there's kind of a negative media feedback loop where women's team sports
are ignored is part of this bigger story of why women's team sports
don't get the kind of attention that men's sports do.
Now in the background here.
A [INAUDIBLE] elephant in the room.
Many people might say or some of you may be thinking fairly enough.
Well the real reason that women's teams sports are not that popular,
because the women just aren't as good as the men.
You know, women don't run as fast, they don't jump as high, it's just
not as exciting to watch a women's basketball or soccer game as a men's game.
And it's true.
There are physiological difference between men and women.
And in terms of strength and speed men probably do have,
in general, some advantages over women.
I wouldn't say, necessarily, that men are more athletic than women.
You should come to my yoga class someday, and
watch me doing yoga with all these other women in the room.
Men, and men of a certain age, we're not as flexible as women.
And flexibility is part of athleticism.
And it's something that women, on average,
are more athletic than men, in that respect.
But okay, so the argument might be, well women's you know they're feeling all
of these dunks and high flying and speeds, say in soccer or in basketball and
other team sports and that's why we don't wanna watch women sports.
But you know, let's think about that for a minute.
You know and let's take the example of tennis and figure skating.
Now in women's tennis Serena Williams hits the heck out of the ball but
the top women's serve I think is somewhere around 130 mph.
The top men's serve the fastest serve is more like 160.
Serena Williams doesn't hit it as hard as the top men, and
she doesn't probably move quite as fast, even though she's a fantastic athlete.
And yet, you know, often women's tennis gets higher viewerships than men's tennis.
And I think that has to do with the fact that women's tennis has this tradition,
it's had these great personalities.
It's had one of the greatest athletes of all times in Serena Williams.
So even though it may not be a sport with as much speed and strength,
although there's a lot of speed and strength as a men, it's super popular.
And the same with figure skating.
You know the women's figure skating championship in the Olympics gets more
press and there are more rewards for the winner than the men's figure skating.
Yeah, the women aren't doing as fancy athletic, as powerful athletic jumps.
Triple axles are pretty rare,
women's figure skating, they're standard business in mens.
And yet, the women's figure skating attracts more viewers.
So, my point in all of this is just saying,
that it's not about why we choose to watch certain sports or certain [INAUDIBLE].
It's not about necessarily who's stronger, faster, men and women.
It really has to do with these cultural, political, and social factors.
And, with things like figure skating, and tennis, and other
individual sports, you have had this history of interest and coverage.
And so people will watch it.
But with women's team sports and going back to those different reasons that I
gave you about why women's team sports haven't had the kind of history and iii.
With women's team sports people are not so willing to watch.
So I would really say that the challenges for women's sports don't have to do with
strength or speed but have much more to do with questions of coverage, of tradition,
of ways of seeing, of the media that those are the key issues at stake.
In the bigger arc of my discussion of gender in women's sports
we've seen this major progress in terms of women's sports and yet
also these obstacles in the way that things are still not even.
I'm actually not all that hopeful about women's team sports gaining the same kinda
priority and rewards and visibility as men's team sports at a professional level
any time in the near future.
We're really not seeing any momentum now towards that happening.
But I think we can all, and always be hopeful and I hope that 40, 50 years ago,
if not in my lifetime in my daughter's lifetime,
that we will see a world in which there is really more parody,
the same kinds of opportunities and rewards for male as for female athletes.
I'll see you next time.
[MUSIC]
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