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Watch Us Play
Can you name three NBA teams and three NFL teams? If so, let me ask you another
question: Can you name three WNBA teams and three professional womens volleyball teams?
This question is a lot harder for individuals to answer, if they answer at all. The ability to answer
shows part of a gender bias that all athletes and spectators in sports see. Mens sports tend to
have packed stadiums with fans dressed all out in team colors, yelling and screaming for their
team trying to get the energy up. That being said, in womens sports, it is unpredictable whether
they will have a packed stadium or maybe one hundred student fans. Gender bias is not only
found in professional or collegiate level sports, you can see this even at a high school or clubsporting event.
Ever since I was five, I have been playing numerous sports: golf, swim, basketball,
soccer, and track and field. When I was young, the only people who attended any games,
whether you were a young female or male, were family members and teammates family
members, but I noticed that as I get older the crowds change. From high school sports, I have
seen and experienced how certain sports are recognized, talked about, attended, and exposed.
Northgates womens golf team has been announced maybe three times in the last four years
although we were league champions for two years, had players placing in the top three and even
winning some tournaments, and making NCS every year. Some mens teams at Northgate do go
unrecognized as well, but one sport that has an extremely big difference in exposure and
recognition is basketball. The mens teams at all levels have so many fans at their games sixth
man, parents, random people who just like the team while the womens teams, more often at
high school level, have parents in their stands and maybe five people maximum from school
who came to cheer for their friend. The only game I have seen a big crowd at for a womens

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basketball game is when Northgate played Berean Christian High School this game was
different because the mens team played after the womans game instead of the same time at a
different location. However, even at that game people only showed up at the end of the womens
game so they could get a spot to sit for the mens game. The recognition the mens team gets is
vastly different from girls as well. Northgates mens team won a game by five points and the
next day everyone was talking about anything that happened during the game, but the womens
team beat their rivals by one point in overtime and no one said a word about it because no one
was there. All of these factors have led to me being very curious about sports and gender bias,
which led me to my question: How does gender bias in sports affect crowd size, media
exposure, recognition, etc.?
Imagine walking into the building and before entering you can hear the balls bouncing,
music playing, and all the fans getting to their seats. You arrive at the wide open doors, letting
the smell of sweat, intensity, and rivalry pull people in. Once you enter, the bright lights and
scoreboard shine throughout and the music is blasting from the speakers to pump up the players
and the fans. You look up at the stands and see a sea of people, half in red and white and half in
blue and white. The fans are decked out in their team colors with their faces painted, posters in
hand and dressed in as much red and white or blue and white as possible. There are parents with
cameras and posters in their own section waiting to cheer on their child and record the whole
thing. As tip off nears, the lights draw you to the court where the players are warming up. You
could see the look in their eyes, the intensity building and their love for the game showing with
every shot they take. Black. The lights go out and the abundance of red and white and blue and
white turn black. You cannot see anything and everyone around you is starting to worry. Anxiety
and tension is building in the stands. Then, one beam of light, center court, let the game begin.

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As you were picturing that scenario, what did you see? Did you see an intense game
about to begin with fans packing the stands? That is what most people saw, and most people also
imagined that it was a mens team playing. That is an example of gender bias in sports. Gender
bias, according to the Cambridge English Dictionary is an unfair difference in the way men and
women are treated (Gender Bias). Gender bias can happen anywhere from a professional
workplace to co-educational youth sports, but within this paper the focus will be on gender bias
in sports. When I went to search for different articles and websites to use, I found that many of
them referred to sports as being mans world, and even our own school psychologist, Mary
Tsuboi said that sports is a mans world. Tsuboi explained that:
[She] thinks that boys are just considered to be better athletes that girls are Also it is
because when we are younger, we are taught to believe that boys can do this and girls
cannot do this and it is not fair. For example, boys can play football but there are no
girls teams for those. Sports, especially professional, are shown to kids of men playing.
Majority of the people I had surveyed, using techniques taught to us by Peter Ceresa in AP
Statistics, said that when they were younger they watched sports with their family and it was
always men playing. Watching sports has always been an excuse many use to go and be with
their friends for those in high school and adults. Shannon Polkinghorn stated that, It seems to
be more of a social event for the boys games than the girls. The social aspect draws numerous
people to the mens games over the womens games. All of these factors lead to one main, yet
broad point sports is and always has been a mans world.
On four different days in March, I went to either downtown Walnut Creek, downtown
Concord, Safeway in the Country Wood Plaza in Walnut Creek, and the Target in Walnut Creek.
Before I went I made sure to have a notebook to hold all of the answers, a pen or pencil, my
random numbers from zero to nine, and two printed sets of my questions. My random numbers,
seven and three, were used to decide when to start my survey and which persons I would survey

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as well. Before conducting my survey I also gave my questions to five people to read over to
make sure my questions were not confusing or worded in a difficult way to read. Once I would
reach my location, I would let six people pass me and then survey the seventh person. From
there I would survey every third person, but if there were a group of people I would skip the
group and just survey the next person. I skipped the groups due to the reason that their answers
may change when they are with others rather than when they are alone. For example, when a
male is with a group of friends and I ask what channel ESPN is on, even if he does not know, he
may act like he does because he is with his friends. I continued to survey every third person
until I reached twenty-five women and twenty-five men, fifty total, then I would go home and
type the results so I could compare all two hundred once I was finished. From the results of this
survey I also wanted to see if there was a difference between men and women. To accomplish
that I surveyed one hundred men and one hundred women total. If I had reached twenty-five
men before I reached twenty-five women, I would change every third person to every third
women that had passed me or vise versa.
Sports for girls never really existed before the 1900s they were just playing
recreationally. Young women were just expected to be proper young ladies who sit quietly,
behave, and do as they are told (Nelson). Sports played by women were extremely unrecognized
until the 1920s when the National Amateur Athletic Federation formed the womens division
for intercollegiate competition (U.S. Sports Academy). This division, although the first
collegiate game for women was decades before, lead to Title IX and girls receiving equality in
collegiate sports. Title IX was put into place in 1972 and states that, No person in the United
States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of,
or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal

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financial assistance (Title IX). This act created countless new open opportunities for women
everywhere in not only sports, but education as well. Now that any person of any gender could
play any sport, everything is equal right? Well that concept is still wrong. Men are respected
for being athletes and men are being paid a lot more for being these professional athletes, said
Tsuboi. Also, sports were and still are funded differently depending on the sport and on the
gender and being a girl playing sports was still frowned upon. Children were still indirectly
taught to associate sports and masculinity, which also made them believe that any girl who
played any type of sport was masculine, a tomboy, or possibly even a lesbian (Nelson 1). New
opportunities in sports for women seemed to also come with more criticism and stereotypes
such as you throw like a girl. The brand Always has started to create commercials they call
#LikeAGirl that show stereotypes that like a girl is not a bad thing to young women, but
everyone else sees it as a demeaning statement toward whom ever they say it to. It is showing
how stereotypes are taught to people to think of a type of person a certain way and no one really
thinks about how they are not good until asked about it. These stereotypes alone show how
many think of women as inferior to men in the world of sports, although we have proven
ourselves in many ways; we still fight for equal participation in the Olympics, Professional
sports, High School sports, Collegiate Sports, and in so many other ways as well. Yet a small
amount of people can still only name one or two professional women athletes/teams.
One reason why many cannot name women athletes or teams is due to the exposure they
receive through media. Thousands of people watch Entertainment and Sports Programming
Network, or better known as ESPN, daily, but you ever see any women athletes or teams on that
program. This is because they have created another program especially for women called
ESPNW. While many call this equal treatment, it is just making the public choose whether to

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watch men or women athletes compete. And, due to our society and how we are indirectly
influenced to watch men play sports over women, the public will choose the mens sports
channel. From the survey I mentioned earlier, I had also asked if they knew what channel ESPN
was on and what channel ESPNW was on. 89 percent of the people surveyed could tell me what
channel ESPN was on, but only about one percent of the people surveyed could give me guess
of what channel ESPNW and only half of that one percent was correct (200 Random). Creating
a separate network for women seems equal and fair, but in reality it seems to be splitting the
female and male sports even more. Along with ESPN and ESPNW, another example of gender
bias in sports is March Madness. March Madness occurs every year for collegiate basketball
teams throughout the country for men and womens teams. The general public get extremely
excited about this event they throw parties, watch every game on television, make brackets on
who they think will win and lose, and they will make bets on their brackets. Over thirteen
million people, including President Obama, submitted brackets for March Madness this year for
the mens NCAA basketball tournament but no know even knows who is still in the running for
Final Four for womens (Tournament Challenge). At school you hear phones going off with
game updates, see students watching games during class and lunch, see teachers and other staff
members watching the games. You walk by the library and the game will be on a computer with
multiple people surrounding it attempting to get a glimpse of the game. Almost the whole
population of people surrounding you becomes obsessed with the mens March Madness and
their brackets.
When you Google search famous athletes and scroll through the top twenty, you will
find that only two of them are women and the other eighteen are men. But what makes them a
top athlete? Is it how they perform? How much money they make? How much they show off?

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Another question that comes to mind while thinking of these is to whom are they compared
with? Is it everyone in his or her sports category? Is it just the men or women who play that
sport? Who knows? They could be considered the top athletes for various reasons, but why are
there only two women? All of these questions have no real answer or if they do, they have no
one answer. Anyone can go on for hours and on tangents of these questions but will never come
to an end if these questions have no one answer, will gender bias ever really cease to exist?
From all the information I have gathered, my answer is no. This is because women have come
so far and yet are still underappreciated and unrecognized in the sports world all due to gender
bias. Women in sports will rise in the amount of recognition, exposure, crowd size etc.,
according to the last decades. If it follows the same trends and people who feel strongly about
this topic take action, women in sports will advance closer to the status that men currently
obtain. Women may never get to that level, but they may eventually come close.
For my project I had decided to attend numerous men and womens sporting event and
take photographs of the athletes. This allowed me to attend different sporting events, both men
and womens, and it allowed me to actually see for myself all sports and crowd sizes rather than
just the ones in play. I have been listening to the morning announcements more lately as well
and have noticed that they do not talk about the spring sports and how they are doing at all. The
only thing they seem to say about them is when they had early release. From the games I have
photographed, mostly basketball, swimming, baseball and softball, there are not very big crowds
at any of them. Besides swimming, you can see a difference just between the amounts of parents
who show up to each game. The last basketball tournament I attended to take photos at, the
mens upper division was playing at the same school as the womens upper division. The mens
team was in the larger, newer gym, while the womens team was in the smaller auxiliary gym.

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The smaller gym made the womens crowd look much larger since the bleachers were filled, but
they were still all parents of the players while the mens gym, while half empty, had parents,
friends, old teammates, families, and people from other teams watching their games. Shannon
Polkinghorn has been mentoring me and been showing me her techniques on how to take great
action photos. Polkinghorn told me that it is, just trial and error, and that you need to do what
works for you; if you know what you like and how to get the result you want, then that is all that
matters. This paper and project have given me a greater amount of knowledge on sports and
gender bias as a whole. While it may have left me with more questions than I started with, it has
answered a few that I had in the beginning. I found that a lot of people saw the gender bias in
sports and how differently they were treated. I was surprised at how it was almost an even
amount of those who thought it was wrong and those who thought that gender bias was there
because sports is a mans world and in general men are better at women at sports.

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Works Cited
Books:
Nelson, Mariah Burton. Are We Winning Yet? How Women Are Changing Sports and
Sports are Changing Women. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. 1991.
Print. March 2016
Nelson, Mariah Burton. The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football: Sexism
and the American Culture of Sports. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.
1994. Print. March 2016
Electronic Sources:
Always Brand. "Always #LikeAGirl." YouTube. YouTube, 26 June 2014. Web. Mar.
2016.
"Gender Bias Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary." Gender Bias Definition
in the Cambridge English Dictionary. Cambridge Dictionary, 2016. Web. 12 Mar.
2016.
Learn, Sage. Its (Still) A Mans World. Parks and Recreation. National Recreation
and Parks Association. 1 November 2014. Web. 12 March 2016
Title IX and Sex Discrimination. Office of Civil Rights. U.S. Department of Education.
29 April 2015. Web. 09 March 2016
Tournament Challenge. ESPN. 2016. Web. March 2016.
U.S. Sports Academy. A History of Women in Sports Prior to Title IX. Sports
Management, Women and Sports. The Sport Journal. 14 March 2008. Web. 05
March 2016
Primary Sources:

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200 Random people. Personal interview. March 2016
Polkinghorn, Shannon. Personal Interview. 21 April 2016
Tsuboi, Mary. Personal Interview. 2 March 2016

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Works Consulted
Books:
Fields, Sarah K. Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America.
Urbana, IL: U of Illinois, 2005. Print. March 2016
Electronic Sources:
Duncan, Margaret Carlisle, Michael Messner, Linda Williams, and Kerry Jensen.
"Gender Stereotyping in Televised Sports - LA84 Foundation." LA84 Foundation. Ed.
Wayne Wilson. The Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles. Web. 1 Mar. 2016.
Fine Motor Skills: The Key To Success R-5-29. Kari Reed. Northgate High School.
Web. 10 March 2016.
Messner, Michael A., Margaret Carlisle Duncan, and Kerry Jensen. Gender & Society.
Gender & Society. Michael Messner, 3 May 2014. Web. 4 Mar. 2016.
Thomasson, Lane. Gender Discrimination in Sports. Bryn Mawr College. 2013. Web.
10 March 2016
Primary Sources:

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