A short story about sexism in the sport industry

If you are a girl and you have played sport at some point in your life, you have probably heard one of these before…

You were probably so shocked or too young that you didn’t exactly know how to react. But guess what, you are not the only one and it sucks! Even professional athletes face sexism in their environment, especially when it comes to TV presenters. Men have always had the right to comment on women in sports whether it is about which sport they can play, what they need to wear, or how sexy they look even if this has nothing to do with the performance itself.

Let us try to see where we started with women fighting for the right to play sports and see what we still need to accomplish… And when I say “we”, I mean “we” as Humanity because this is a matter of equality!

A long time ago… sports’ inaccessibility to women

Getting back to the 19th century in Europe, women started taking part in sporting activities. They remained a small part of the players as there were strong conditions, they had to abide by such as discretion, beauty, or grace. They could not take part in most of the sports seen as violent such as football, rugby, or hockey but were strongly represented in dancing or gymnastics as it was viewed as appropriate for the female body.

However, the war between Germany and France back in the 1870s made it harder for women to keep practising sports. After France lost the war, Pierre de Coubertin, the inventor of the modern Olympic Games, saw practising sports as a way of building a strong body that could help win future wars. Sport became a way to express oneself and to mitigate feelings, which was only for men. However, should you remember one name in this fight, Alice Millat, one of the pioneers of feminine sport in France? In 1921, she created “La fédération sportive feminine internationale”, which enabled women to take part in female sporting events. We were far behind women competing in the same competitions as men and with the same TV coverage, but at least, there is some progress!

Gender testing to assess female athletes’ performance

When women started to gain some coverage out there, they started to work against each other’s interests. Some competitors started to discredit others because of their body characteristics. Getting the chance to practice was tough but competing as a woman became even tougher. Winning an Olympic medal is that hard and competitors are in such a pocket handkerchief that sporting institutions had to decide. World Athletics considered a new option: gender testing was introduced back in 1966 in track & field.

The idea behind this was to rate women’s powerfulness according to various criteria to testify if they were able to compete in the women’s races. These criteria evolved over the years but seem to never have been the right ones; the underlying question here is what do women that cannot compete in their disciplines? Although it is very unlikely that these women with high testosterone rates could get near to men’s timing in the 800 meter races, Caster Semenya, a South African athlete got banned from running in the 800 meters with women. She had to switch disciplines and is now running 3000 meter races; do you imagine how big of a change in someone’s career this must be without speaking of the mental consequences of this decision? Here again, society defines what this female body should look like.

Want to know more about Semenya’s fight? Her interview with The Guardian says it all!

As professional athletes want to keep competing, some of them had to turn themselves hyperfeminine to be able to compete and try to be rated for what they are worth.

Selling more through female athletes’ hypersexualization

What makes you a nice woman when practising?

• Wear lots of make-up and jewellery.
• Do not forget to straighten your hair before playing out on a field when raining, it does make sense! No one knows why, but it makes you look like a woman.

Sport is this kind of industry where women have been hypersexualized because of the rules they had to follow in order to compete. Look at the clothes they wear compared to men and how these have evolved over the past few centuries. Let us take the example of athletics because it speaks for itself. Is it shocking to see women wearing bikinis when jumping, while men are wearing short sleeves and shorts? Is it logical to see women wearing super tight-fitting clothes while men have at least three different suits?

Of course not, society has chosen these different rules for athletes. And when women try to change the rules of the game, to protest, or only raise the question, entities tell them to respect the place, the sport, and the institution behind it. What rule exactly are they not abiding by? The non-existent law that says women should wear 30% fewer clothes than men when playing sports?

What about the TV coverage of female sports events?

Seeing women competing in their tight outfits is now something that society gets interested in; TV coverage is then one of the most interesting touchpoints when talking about female sporting events.

If you have ever watched the Olympics on TV, you have probably seen how commentators focus exclusively on the outfits of athletes, on them being women first and athletes second, or, when it comes to performing, on the men that are behind every female athlete winning a medal. They would rather talk about the male trainer than the feminine athlete herself as she won her medal by putting that one specific person, which happens to be a man, on stage! And I am not mentioning that this is only visible if you get the chance to see women’s races rather than men’s ones. As a fact, UNESCO released a survey testifying, “outside the period of major sporting festivals, statistics claim that 40% of all sports participants are women, yet women’s sports receive only around 4% of all sports media coverage.”

Feminism in the sports industry is starting to look like something!

Female sport has come a long way and the road ahead is still long, but sportive feminism is definitely on track. As Béatrice Barbusse, a French writer, said in her book Du sexisme dans le sport: “Sport enables [female athletes] to make [their] body [their] own” and thus regardless of comments on social media or TV.

If you want to know more about issues women are facing when trying to compete in international events, feel free to watch this video going further in the explanation of “gender testing”.

I would like to know more about your personal stories! Your personal story as an amateur athlete or as a professional one is more than welcome in the comments.

About this article

This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminating the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.