Has Gender Inequity in Sports Affected Your Kids?

In a dazzling display of basketball prowess, the women of Baylor University won over Notre Dame in last night’s NCAA Championships. The annual March Madness basketball tournament also prompted the New York Times this week to examine how and why the coaches of women’s teams get paid far less than those of men’s teams.

Gender inequity in sports is an entrenched problem with no simple solution. As a parent, though, I have to ask: Do your kids of any gender play or watch sports? Have they noticed anything different about the way male and female athletes are treated? Has this changed their motivation (either positively or negatively)? (If your kids are too young to do sports yet, feel free to answer about your own experience with sports as a child.)

2 thoughts on “Has Gender Inequity in Sports Affected Your Kids?”

  1. I am, as yet, a kidless 27-year-old. But it is something that came up for me as a child, though this is now 18 years ago. In my home town the recreational t-ball was co-ed for K-1 and then split into boys’ baseball and girls’ softball starting in 2nd grade. I played baseball with the boys in second grade (I also played boys’ soccer that year) and then the next year signed up again. My parents got a call from my coach to let us know when the first day of practice was and when we got there, it was a girls’ softball team. Someone had noticed my registration form and knew I was a girl so crossed out the baseball information and replaced it–all without informing me or my parents. Well, I refused to play and my mom called up the league athletic director and took it to him on the phone. He told her that if girls were allowed to play baseball with the boys that it would be “just recreational.” This, a 3rd-grade recreational baseball league would be “just recreational.” She wrote a scathing letter to the town paper and I played baseball after that until 6th grade (and my team won the championship that year!!).

    Looking back, I recognize that my motivation for playing boys’ sports was that I saw them as more competitive. This in itself reflects some of the gender bias in how we raise children. It was true when we were 8 or 9, but definitely not true by the time we were 12. After so publicly committing myself to baseball, when it came to the point that the boys hit puberty and we graduated from “recreational” to “travel” and I could no longer keep up, I felt like softball wasn’t an option for me. This despite the fact that the fast-pitch teams were serious, competitive and intense. While I loved my years playing baseball, I wish I had swallowed my pride and made the switch when I was 13 instead of playing sports I didn’t love as much as ball. But what I really wish is that I didn’t have to choose sports by gender.

  2. Our 12 year old daughter is currently playing on the Boys Little League Major teams. She loves baseball and is quite upset that this year will be her last year. The league will not let girls continue playing in the boys baseball league past the age of 12. She is just as good, if not better, as most of the boys on the team. It’s a shame we aren’t given the option to choose ourselves.

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