By Joel Tichinoff, Sports Editor
Cheerleaders waving pompoms on the sidelines of a football field is the iconic image of the gender role women have long played in sports, particularly when it comes to high-performance athletics at the university and professional level. Great strides have been made in the last 50 years to bring about gender-equality in sports. Yet, compared to society at large, nowhere is there a stronger and more accepted gender inequality than in sports.
Whereas many professional fields traditionally dominated by men have seen at the very least strong positive inroads made by women, sports remains a blatantly male-dominated area. The average NBA (National Basketball Association) player’s salary is $4 million dollars. The average annual salary for a player in the WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association) is $46,000. The only professional sport where male to female earnings are even remotely comparable is tennis. At virtually all levels in every sport, male athletes are regarded faster, stronger and more skilled than their female counterparts and are paid accordingly. Women simply do not have the opportunities men do when it comes to professional sports. For all the value placed on gender equality, there is an uncomfortable and often disregarded perception that, when it comes to athletics, women can’t compete at an even level with men.
In university athletics, this perception becomes even more uncomfortable as university sports are essentially an extension of higher education. University athletics are unique in that they pit the intellectual and cultural values of academia against the reality of gender inequality in sports.
In 2001, the CIS (Canadian Inter-university Sport) Annual General Meeting announced an updated gender-equity policy to address concerns about unbalanced opportunities for female student-athletes. The CIS defined equity as being achieved when “all persons enjoy the same status regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, language, disability, income and other diversities. It means that all persons have equal conditions for realizing their full rights and potential and to benefit from the results.”
Eight years later, Dalhousie fields 12 varsity teams, evenly divided between men and women, in six athletics disciplines. There are 121 male athletes at Dalhousie, and 125 women athletes splitting a varsity budget of $986,000.
The university annually offers its athletes one of the highest amounts of Athletic Financial Awards (AFAs) in Canada, $304,922. Sixty-one per cent of these awards went to male athletes, who make up 49 per cent of the total number of Dal athletes. The average male athlete at Dalhousie receives $1534.44 from these awards, while the average female athlete receives $953.55. In this respect, Dal is hovering around the national average of 60 percent of Athletic Financial Awards going to male athletes versus 40 per cent to female athletes.
Of the 10,000 student athletes who compete in CIS sports events annually across the country, 54 per cent are male, 46 per cent are female. The reason for the disparity in funding is a large chunk of AFA money comes from alumni donations. Most men’s sports teams have substantially longer histories, which may contribute to the divide. The Dal men’s Hockey team for example has played 81 seasons since 1923, the women’s team just 11 in the Atlantic University Sport (AUS), meaning they have larger pool of alumni donating funds to their former programs.
Alumni donations usually come with strings attached: former players want to support their former teams, thus the university has little choice but to give those funds to the specified teams. The alternative is to deny men’s sports the alumni donations in order to maintain gender equality.
Despite the fact that women’s sports teams have fewer resources available to them, Dal’s women’s teams are generally more successful than the men’s teams. Since 2004, the women’s basketball team has had 68 wins and 38 losses in 107 games. By comparison, the men’s team has won 44 and lost 62 in 106 games. The women’s hockey team has gone 55-51-6 since 2004 while the men’s team has gone 30-107-12.
For all the success Dal’s women have had compared to the men’s teams, attendance numbers belie the disadvantage women face when it comes to sports fan culture. The men’s hockey team had 723 fans show up for last Friday’s 6-4 home win against St. Francis Xavier. The following night, 100 fans came out to support the women’s hockey team in a 6-3 home win versus SMU. The men’s hockey team has missed the playoffs for five straight years. In the same time frame, the women’s team have made the playoffs for five straight years. The same attendance figures are true for the men’s and women’s basketball teams. The men’s team have gone 44-62 over the past six regular seasons while the women have gone 68-39. In spite of their success, only 150 fans came out to the last women’s home game, a 83-72 loss to the X-women, while over 300 attended the men’s home game, a 83-71 loss to the X-men. The men’s game immediately followed the women’s game.
Overall, Dal women’s six varsity teams have brought home 102 AUS championships in a total of 243 seasons (all teams combined) – a staggering 42 per cent success rate. The men’s varsity teams have played a combined 428 seasons winning 108 AUS championships – a 25 per cent success rate.
It’s telling that Dal’s women’s sports teams win nearly twice as often as men’s teams, but draw only a fraction of the fans men’s sports enjoy. Why does the culture of sports lag so far behind broader society in terms of gender equality? What is it that allows the image of football players and cheerleaders to persist in our collective imagination?
Women are no less physically active than men, and it can be argued that women prefer to be physically active in non-competitive recreational “sports” such as yoga, running and dance classes. Perhaps Dalhousie should work toward improving the balance of opportunities for physical activity that cater to gender preferences on campus.
Our we should all give women’s sports the credit it deserves.
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