Sports and Gender
With the olympics occuring right now, I took this as a perfect oppertunity to talk about this topic.
With regards to American sports, we find that most female professional leagues are dominated or even washed into oblivion from the male sporting world. For example, The WNBA is a female basketball league that features stars like Diana Taursai (who I bet many of you readers may have never heard of before). The WNBA's counterpart, the NBA, features many more talents with many more brand names like Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, and you name it. These male athletes have started their own brands and turned their public figures into multi-million dollar famous companies. While athletes like Taursai are paid under a hundred thousand for their same efforts.
While we are on the topic of these multi-million dollar companies, the jersey sales are crucial in products relating to basketball. In class, we talked about how the male "kept his own name." Imagine if a big time name in the NBA like Steph Curry or Lebron James changed his name due to marriage or other ways. Their respective companies, apperal, merchandise? All of them would be affected because of a measly name change.
Back to the olympics, me and a group of friends watched the figure skating events and some of the events by the female skaters were incredible. It is obviously a remarkable feat to reach the olympics, but the women who performed in front of the Korean crowd worked incredibly hard to get to where they were. And something as silly as the difference between an "X chromosome" shouldn't take away from the breath-taking talents they displayed last night.
Should gender affect the way were percieve athletes?
With regards to American sports, we find that most female professional leagues are dominated or even washed into oblivion from the male sporting world. For example, The WNBA is a female basketball league that features stars like Diana Taursai (who I bet many of you readers may have never heard of before). The WNBA's counterpart, the NBA, features many more talents with many more brand names like Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, and you name it. These male athletes have started their own brands and turned their public figures into multi-million dollar famous companies. While athletes like Taursai are paid under a hundred thousand for their same efforts.
While we are on the topic of these multi-million dollar companies, the jersey sales are crucial in products relating to basketball. In class, we talked about how the male "kept his own name." Imagine if a big time name in the NBA like Steph Curry or Lebron James changed his name due to marriage or other ways. Their respective companies, apperal, merchandise? All of them would be affected because of a measly name change.
Back to the olympics, me and a group of friends watched the figure skating events and some of the events by the female skaters were incredible. It is obviously a remarkable feat to reach the olympics, but the women who performed in front of the Korean crowd worked incredibly hard to get to where they were. And something as silly as the difference between an "X chromosome" shouldn't take away from the breath-taking talents they displayed last night.Should gender affect the way were percieve athletes?
I really like your connection to the Olympics. It felt very relevant, but maybe you could consider a male-dominant event like snowboarding. I think a lot of us automatically associate figure skating with females already, so if you were to analyze another sport, it would be much more effective.
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