Gender Relations & Sports

Gender roles in Western societies have been changing rapidly in recent years, with the changes created both by evolutionary changes in society, including economic shifts which have altered the way people work and indeed which people work as more and more women enter the workforce, and by pressure brought to make changes because of the perception that the traditional social structure was inequitable. Gender relations are part of the socialization process, the initiation given the young by society, teaching them certain values and creating in them certain behavior patterns acceptable to their social roles. These roles have been in a state of flux in American society in recent years, and men and women today can be seen as having expanded their roles in society, with women entering formerly male dominions and men finding new ways to relate to and function in the family unit. One of the primary spurs to these changes has been a search for equity, for the truly equal treatment before the law that American society has always promised but has not always delivered. There was a time when men were sent to college and women were not, and women fought their way into our institutions of higher learning and showed that they could benefit greatly from the experience and that society would benefit as well. Colleges and universities remain a battleground of ideas and social change, and today one such battle involves the desire for equitable treatment of women in terms of pr

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to meet the 1978 deadline. Within six years, the percentage of school athletes who were female rose from 7 percent to about 33 percent. A series of events stalled further growth, however, beginning with a 1984 Supreme Court decision that overturned Title IX, causing the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights to scrap all investigations then in progress. The law was restored 4 years later, but it was evident that by then, federal agencies were overburdened and lacked the resources to make inspections or enforce the law. The result has been a hypocritical situation where what is spoken and what is done are quite different: Today, it is impossible to find an athletic director who does not publicly proclaim support for the principle of gender equity in sports, but it is also nearly impossible to find a school that fully complies with the law (Schrof, 1994, 52). The degree of failure of Title IX is apparent in a survey conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education in 199394 which showed that male athletes enjoy more scholarship money and more sports opportunities than their female counterparts in U.S. colleges. These findings are similar to those in the survey conducted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association in

Category: Psychology - G