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Gender Inequality in Sports
"We trained just as hard and we have just as much love for our sport. We deserve to play just as much as any other athlete. . . . I am sick and tired of being treated like I am second rate. I plan on standing up for what is right and fighting for equality." --Sage Ohlensehlen, Women's Swim Team Captain at the University of Iowa
Forty years ago, US president Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law, making it illegal for federally funded education programs to discriminate based on sex. The law set into motion a massive boom in girls and women's sports teams, from kindergarten to the collegiate level. Professional women's sports grew in turn. Title IX became a massive touchstone in the fight for gender equality. So why do girls and women--including trans and intersex women--continue to face sexist attitudes and unfair rules and regulations in sports?
The truth is that the road to equality in sports has been anything but straightforward, and there is still a long way to go. Schools, universities, and professional organizations continue to struggle with addressing unequal pay, discrimination, and sexism in their sports programming. Delve into the history and impact of Title IX, learn more about the athletes at the forefront of the struggle, and explore how additional changes could lead to equality in sports.
"Girls are socialized to know . . . that gender roles are already set. Men run the world. Men have the power. Men make the decisions. . . . When these girls are coming out, who are they looking up to telling them that's not the way it has to be? And where better to do that than in sports?" --Muffet McGraw, Head Women's Basketball Coach at Notre Dame
"Fighting for equal rights and equal opportunities entails risk. It demands you put yourself in harm's way by calling out injustice when it occurs. Sometimes it's big things, like a boss making overtly sexist remarks or asserting they won't hire women. But far more often, it's little, seemingly innocuous, things . . . that sideline the women whose work you depend on every day. You can use your privilege to help those who don't have it. It's really as simple as that." --Liz Elting, women's rights advocate
Forty years ago, US president Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law, making it illegal for federally funded education programs to discriminate based on sex. The law set into motion a massive boom in girls and women's sports teams, from kindergarten to the collegiate level. Professional women's sports grew in turn. Title IX became a massive touchstone in the fight for gender equality. So why do girls and women--including trans and intersex women--continue to face sexist attitudes and unfair rules and regulations in sports?
The truth is that the road to equality in sports has been anything but straightforward, and there is still a long way to go. Schools, universities, and professional organizations continue to struggle with addressing unequal pay, discrimination, and sexism in their sports programming. Delve into the history and impact of Title IX, learn more about the athletes at the forefront of the struggle, and explore how additional changes could lead to equality in sports.
"Girls are socialized to know . . . that gender roles are already set. Men run the world. Men have the power. Men make the decisions. . . . When these girls are coming out, who are they looking up to telling them that's not the way it has to be? And where better to do that than in sports?" --Muffet McGraw, Head Women's Basketball Coach at Notre Dame
"Fighting for equal rights and equal opportunities entails risk. It demands you put yourself in harm's way by calling out injustice when it occurs. Sometimes it's big things, like a boss making overtly sexist remarks or asserting they won't hire women. But far more often, it's little, seemingly innocuous, things . . . that sideline the women whose work you depend on every day. You can use your privilege to help those who don't have it. It's really as simple as that." --Liz Elting, women's rights advocate
- GenresNonfiction
120 pages, Hardcover
Published April 5, 2022
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February 7, 2024
IN LAUDEM COLLEGE, TITLE IX, and BOURGEOIS BALLERS
INTRODUCTION
Today (2024), women outnumber men in college by 16 percent, although enrollment has been down 10 percent in the last four years. For this review, the enrollment decline is an analog of the change in the role of colleges in women's football. However, the rise of women attending university corresponds to the soaring number of female footballers and females increasing in all spheres of life, such as in business, government, art, music, and even the vocational blue-collar trades. The increase of women in professional soccer also corresponds to the advancement of women in the historical scheme of things: we have entered what the Germans call a new weltanschauung, the Americans, a new paradigm, and the hippies, along with other esoteric types, a New Age that is transnational and no longer dominated by the male half of the species.
TITLE IX
Kirstin Cronn-Mills' Gender Inequality in Sports: From Title IX to World Titles (2022) argues that Title IX was a catalyst for a gender revolution in sports that transformed sports into a more equal, if not more equitable endeavor regarding gender differences. The legislation is also known as the 37 Rule because the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination contains only thirty-seven words:
No person in the United States shall, based on sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. (quoted in Carlton, 2021)
The rule does not mention sports specifically. Nevertheless, despite the law's generality and vagueness, federal regulators demanded specific and concrete examples of how universities adhered to the legislation. Consequently, college administrators consulted their lawyers on how they could comply without too much ado. Some lawyers recommended establishing soccer programs as a solution without realizing how this "easy way out" would increase female participation in women's soccer exponentially (Petri, 2022). Before the 1972 Title IX Act, 700 girls played high school soccer. By 2018, there were more than 390,000. In the same year, only 16 universities and colleges had women's soccer teams; by 2018, there were 1,048 (Carlton, 2021). This review further discusses Cronn-Mills' description of Title IX's impact on gender equality and equity in sports and elaborates on the symbiotic relationship between women's football, Title IX, education and speculates on what the future holds for the sport of women's football.
American women's football may have found its metaphorical roots when upper-crust girls at Smith College adopted Europe's primary sport and planted it on American soil until soccer became the dominant women's team sport in the U.S. Moreover, it was not by chance that after the passage of Title IX, women's participation in soccer team soared and America's national team won the Fédération internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in 1991, 1999, 2015, and 2019, inspiriting and empowering hundreds of thousands of young girls and women to play soccer as complementary to their formal education (Conversation with AI Bing, 10/21/2023). Rule 37 had changed soccer programs into college-farm clubs for girls and women aspiring to play football professionally. This university/soccer symbiosis is a relationship unique to the United States, whereas in Europe and elsewhere, higher education is orthogonal to sports of any kind. The idea of the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, or Oxford having a football team with mascots and cheerleaders is ludicrous even among Americans (Markovits, 2023).
After Title IX, universities such as Stanford, Virginia, Florida State, and UCLA were schools that produced the most women's soccer stars, with the University of North Carolina (UNC) leading the pack because of the legendary Anson Dorrance, who single-handedly built the University into the women's football powerhouse that it is still today. In 1991, as coach of the Women's National Team, he took his squad, comprised mainly of UNC graduates, to China, played against the world's great professional teams and beat them at their own game (Ibid). After Dorrance slew the Viking Valkyries, the Norwegians, European players began a trek to North Carolina and other American universities when few Europeans thought the U.S. had anything of value to offer. These universities partly attracted European footballers because of the American university idyllic campus myth, which U.S. students took for granted.
Superstar Lucy Bronze said she chose to go to the U.S. and UNC from England because she wanted to experience a different culture and style of play and because of Mia Hamm, the 1999 World Cup goddess and the face of American football at turn of the century. Another Brit and Euro Cup winner, Rachel Daly, who played for St. John's University, chose the U.S. because she felt it was the best place to develop her skills and pursue her professional dream. Alessia Russo, 2023 Euro Gold Cup rookie player, went to North Carolina even though England's most prestigious club, Chelsea, offered her a contract before her going to America. (Conversation with AI Bing, 10/21/2023).
Across the border to the north, Canadian superstar Jesse Fleming played soccer in the U.S. at UCLA, where she studied environmental engineering. Recently (2024), Fleming chose to return to America from Chelsea to play for the Portland Thorns in the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL). Canadian icon Christine Sinclair played for the University of Portland, where she won two NCAA titles. She said she chose to go to the U.S. because of American idol Tiffany Milbrett, a former Portland star.
The University of Portland is one of the three top Catholic universities, with Notre Dame and the University of Santa Clara, which has produced the most non-WASP players for the United States National team. Sinclair and the American Megan Rapinoe were teammates at Portland, coming of age by going to college before competing on opposing national teams and professional clubs. No athlete has done more for gender equity, economic equality, and other social justice issues than Rapinoe, who attended Portland on a Title IX-related scholarship. To this day, national club teams in Europe still kneel for inclusiveness and against racism before every contest, continuing Rapinoe's global and lasting impact off and on the pitch (Jackson, 2023).
The cultural, intellectual, and other reasons behind foreign football players joining an American university soccer program should not distract from its material benefits, especially for footballers from developing countries who benefit from Title IX, even though the legislation is exclusively domestic. For example, the global average salary for women's soccer players is $14,000, while goodies for playing at an American college, like tuition, room and board, meals, performance bonuses, and money-making opportunities from name, image, and likeness rights, comes in at around a $100,000 value annually. When a young, talented soccer player in Nigeria (eight players with American college experience at the 2023 Women's World Cup), or Ireland, Costa Rica, or Haiti (seven players each) considers career alternatives, playing for an American college team has its benefits. American university soccer programs have done more to reverse the image of the "Ugly American" than what our vaulted neo-liberal diplomatic corps has accomplished in decades. The impact of the American Title IX soccer/ university system's global reach prompted the sports sociologist Victoria Jackson to claim:
Women's college soccer in the U.S. is the most elite developmental league in the world. Without it, Jamaica (with 20 players with NCAA experience), [New Zealand (17)], the Philippines (17), and Canada (22), for example, would have had a much harder time sharpening the skills necessary to qualify for the [2023] World Cup. (Ibid).
However, while other countries continue to be dependent on American college soccer, in the U.S., more women are choosing to forego university soccer to play for a professional club straight out of college, a precedent set by the 2024 captain of the American National Team, Lindsey Horan, who, when a teenager went directly from high school to play with Olympique Lyonnaise in Europe. When Americans asked what college she attended, she replied, "France." While some Europeans want to experience the American way of playing football with its Title IX University soccer model, Americans like Lindsey Horan, are attracted to European football. For example, star midfielders Rose Lavelle (Wisconsin) and Sam Mewis (UCLA) played for Manchester City in England and starting 2019 World Cup team forward Tobin Heath (North Carolina) played for Arsenal in England, which defender Emily Fox (North Carolina) recently joined. Caterina Marcario (Stanford) played for Lyon Olympique and is now with Mia Fischer (UCLA) at Chelsea. However, although the lion's share of the current crop of women professional players graduated from college, the next generation may go directly from high school to join a professional club at home or overseas. (Microsoft Bing, personal communication, January 30, 2024).
The sports political scientist Andrei Markovits associates the European trend to skip college and go professional straight out of high school with Europhiles wanting American soccer programs to be like women's football in France, Germany, and Spain, with its national team winning the World Cup in 2023. That Iberian victory prompted the U.S. Soccer Federation to accelerate measures to make the American soccer system more like Europe's. The reasons given for these measures are to 1) enlarge the pool for standout football players, including infusing the team with younger players unavailable through the Title IX university pipeline, and 2) expand and strengthen the NWSL's club teams to eventually replace university as football farm clubs. European methods, the Europhiles argue, can offer more specialized and intensive coaching, competition, and experience for players who are ready and willing to dedicate themselves to the sport from an early age. Consequently, while foreign national teams that do not enjoy supportive domestic leagues will become increasingly dependent on American college soccer to excel, Americans will grow less dependent on U.S. Title IX soccer schools. According to Jackson, what made American soccer once dominant, Title IX, and its impact on sports at the university level may soon be obsolete, if not already (Markovits, 2023; Jackson, 2023).
The real reason behind the shift from university soccer programs to the NWSL professional clubs, such as the Portland Thorns, the Gotham Football Club, and Seattle's O.L. Reign, is the old capitalist gods of self-interest, money, and power. Once the financial and media worlds believed that women's football had enormous commercial potential, media, international corporations, and other financial entities began changing professional soccer more into the entertainment business, hardly the purvey of colleges and universities (Fitzgerald, 2021).
RECAPITULATION
This review argues that Title IX impacted more than gender equality and equity in sports. The legislation also changed the nature of women's soccer in the United States and globally. Before Title IX, U.S. women's football was an esoteric upper-class bourgeois flower growing organically on marginal and foreign soil. Then the Feds passed Rule 37, leaving University administrators scratching their heads about how to comply. Their attorneys recommended that colleges establish "football" programs parallel to men's football. Afterward, the visionary Anson Dorrance leveraged Rule 37 at the University of North Carolina, making the University and the National Team global football powerhouses. Among his North Carolina students were the legends Mia Hamm, Christine Lilly, and Michelle Akers, stars of the famous U.S. squad that won the World Cup in 1999. This iconic Team ushered in America's Golden Age of football that reached its zenith in 2019, when the women won their fourth World Cup in France, giving us Megan Rapinoe (University of Portland), Alex Morgan (Cal Berkeley), and Christen Press (Stanford) as peerless sport goddesses.
At that time, Jill Ellis, among the greatest football coaches, was at the helm of the 2019 squad. Ellis' greatness was not only in winning two World Cups in a row but also in her ability to win when her 2019 Team was agitating for social justice issues ranging from equal pay to supporting minority rights to promoting LBGTQ issues. When Ellis retired in October of that World Cup year, she became president of a new NWSL franchise, The San Diego Wave F.C. Her transition from staff to higher management was symbolically fitting with American Soccer shifting from the Title IX model of university and soccer symbiosis to U.S. sport's next iteration, the entrepreneurial commercial stage. This transition is producing a younger, more malleable and, as this review argues, a less educated National Team. The first version of this new squad went to the 2023 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and met utter defeat at the feet of the Swedes, America's new Nordic Valkyries.
Of the four World Cups the USWNST has won, only two stand out, the 1999 and 2019 Teams. The 1999 and 2019 World Cup winners are iconic because both squads forged their identities against formidable opposition. When U.S. Soccer told the squad in 1999 that they had to endure their lower pay, dismal training facilities, and machismo disrespect, the women threatened to strike, continued to protest, and beat the Chinese while 40 million viewers watched. At the end of the contest, all-American sweetheart Brandi Chastain awarded fans by taking off her jersey and waving it before a celebratory crowd. When asked what she felt during her celebration, she said, in retrospect, freedom and power, if not transcendence (Tang, 2021).
The 2019 World Cup team continued and completed the struggle for equal pay initiated by the 1999 team twenty years ago. In addition, the squad reshaped its identity by becoming one of the few bourgeois woke entities to successfully use its newfound freedom and power for collective causes, including social justice and LBGTQ issues. This identity emerged against varied opposition from within and without, ranging from beer-drinking white trash to the then President, burger-loving Donald Trump. How the new National Women's Soccer Team will fare and what identity it will take in its new media entrepreneurial and Europhile environment is a matter of conjecture.
This reviewer predicts that on the pitch, the new Coach, Emma Hayes, still at Chelsea (England), perhaps the most dominating club in Europe, will continue with the American style of football that relies on the ruthless attack, owing to the players' youth, speed, physicality, and endurance. Although possession football, characteristic of European teams, is not in her cards, besides focusing on youth, Hayes's shift to Europeanization will be to refine America's brute strength with superior European clinical skills and greater discipline on the pitch. She will be merciless in benching veterans and starting newer, younger, and rawer players. She could not care less about which college they went to or if they had gone to the university. The New Team will remain bourgeois and be more ethnically diverse but less so regarding the gender spectrum. The squad will be straighter, less ideological, younger, less creative, less educated, and more malleable than previous U.S. National teams. Child soldiers, as a mercenary warlord, observed, make the best killers.
Will the New Americans win the Olympics this year (2024)? They should, now that working-class England and the country bumpkin Swedes had failed to qualify. That leaves the elegant World Cup Spanish, the ectomorph German Aryans, and a resurgent multi-ethnic French team as the primary European contenders. However, do not rule out the Canadians. After all, more than half of their current players, including Jade Rose of Harvard, went to American colleges. Title IX and the Halls of Ivy may still have some old magic in the works.
REFERENCES
Carlton, G. (2021). How Title IX Impacts Women's Equality in College Athletics. Best Colleges. https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/202...
Petri, A. E. (2022). Once an 'Easy Way Out' for Equality, Women's Soccer Is Now a U.S. Force. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/sp...
Fitzgerlad, T. (2022). Forbes. The Fastest-Growing Audiences On TV Are For Woman Sports
INTRODUCTION
Today (2024), women outnumber men in college by 16 percent, although enrollment has been down 10 percent in the last four years. For this review, the enrollment decline is an analog of the change in the role of colleges in women's football. However, the rise of women attending university corresponds to the soaring number of female footballers and females increasing in all spheres of life, such as in business, government, art, music, and even the vocational blue-collar trades. The increase of women in professional soccer also corresponds to the advancement of women in the historical scheme of things: we have entered what the Germans call a new weltanschauung, the Americans, a new paradigm, and the hippies, along with other esoteric types, a New Age that is transnational and no longer dominated by the male half of the species.
TITLE IX
Kirstin Cronn-Mills' Gender Inequality in Sports: From Title IX to World Titles (2022) argues that Title IX was a catalyst for a gender revolution in sports that transformed sports into a more equal, if not more equitable endeavor regarding gender differences. The legislation is also known as the 37 Rule because the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination contains only thirty-seven words:
No person in the United States shall, based on sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. (quoted in Carlton, 2021)
The rule does not mention sports specifically. Nevertheless, despite the law's generality and vagueness, federal regulators demanded specific and concrete examples of how universities adhered to the legislation. Consequently, college administrators consulted their lawyers on how they could comply without too much ado. Some lawyers recommended establishing soccer programs as a solution without realizing how this "easy way out" would increase female participation in women's soccer exponentially (Petri, 2022). Before the 1972 Title IX Act, 700 girls played high school soccer. By 2018, there were more than 390,000. In the same year, only 16 universities and colleges had women's soccer teams; by 2018, there were 1,048 (Carlton, 2021). This review further discusses Cronn-Mills' description of Title IX's impact on gender equality and equity in sports and elaborates on the symbiotic relationship between women's football, Title IX, education and speculates on what the future holds for the sport of women's football.
American women's football may have found its metaphorical roots when upper-crust girls at Smith College adopted Europe's primary sport and planted it on American soil until soccer became the dominant women's team sport in the U.S. Moreover, it was not by chance that after the passage of Title IX, women's participation in soccer team soared and America's national team won the Fédération internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in 1991, 1999, 2015, and 2019, inspiriting and empowering hundreds of thousands of young girls and women to play soccer as complementary to their formal education (Conversation with AI Bing, 10/21/2023). Rule 37 had changed soccer programs into college-farm clubs for girls and women aspiring to play football professionally. This university/soccer symbiosis is a relationship unique to the United States, whereas in Europe and elsewhere, higher education is orthogonal to sports of any kind. The idea of the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, or Oxford having a football team with mascots and cheerleaders is ludicrous even among Americans (Markovits, 2023).
After Title IX, universities such as Stanford, Virginia, Florida State, and UCLA were schools that produced the most women's soccer stars, with the University of North Carolina (UNC) leading the pack because of the legendary Anson Dorrance, who single-handedly built the University into the women's football powerhouse that it is still today. In 1991, as coach of the Women's National Team, he took his squad, comprised mainly of UNC graduates, to China, played against the world's great professional teams and beat them at their own game (Ibid). After Dorrance slew the Viking Valkyries, the Norwegians, European players began a trek to North Carolina and other American universities when few Europeans thought the U.S. had anything of value to offer. These universities partly attracted European footballers because of the American university idyllic campus myth, which U.S. students took for granted.
Superstar Lucy Bronze said she chose to go to the U.S. and UNC from England because she wanted to experience a different culture and style of play and because of Mia Hamm, the 1999 World Cup goddess and the face of American football at turn of the century. Another Brit and Euro Cup winner, Rachel Daly, who played for St. John's University, chose the U.S. because she felt it was the best place to develop her skills and pursue her professional dream. Alessia Russo, 2023 Euro Gold Cup rookie player, went to North Carolina even though England's most prestigious club, Chelsea, offered her a contract before her going to America. (Conversation with AI Bing, 10/21/2023).
Across the border to the north, Canadian superstar Jesse Fleming played soccer in the U.S. at UCLA, where she studied environmental engineering. Recently (2024), Fleming chose to return to America from Chelsea to play for the Portland Thorns in the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL). Canadian icon Christine Sinclair played for the University of Portland, where she won two NCAA titles. She said she chose to go to the U.S. because of American idol Tiffany Milbrett, a former Portland star.
The University of Portland is one of the three top Catholic universities, with Notre Dame and the University of Santa Clara, which has produced the most non-WASP players for the United States National team. Sinclair and the American Megan Rapinoe were teammates at Portland, coming of age by going to college before competing on opposing national teams and professional clubs. No athlete has done more for gender equity, economic equality, and other social justice issues than Rapinoe, who attended Portland on a Title IX-related scholarship. To this day, national club teams in Europe still kneel for inclusiveness and against racism before every contest, continuing Rapinoe's global and lasting impact off and on the pitch (Jackson, 2023).
The cultural, intellectual, and other reasons behind foreign football players joining an American university soccer program should not distract from its material benefits, especially for footballers from developing countries who benefit from Title IX, even though the legislation is exclusively domestic. For example, the global average salary for women's soccer players is $14,000, while goodies for playing at an American college, like tuition, room and board, meals, performance bonuses, and money-making opportunities from name, image, and likeness rights, comes in at around a $100,000 value annually. When a young, talented soccer player in Nigeria (eight players with American college experience at the 2023 Women's World Cup), or Ireland, Costa Rica, or Haiti (seven players each) considers career alternatives, playing for an American college team has its benefits. American university soccer programs have done more to reverse the image of the "Ugly American" than what our vaulted neo-liberal diplomatic corps has accomplished in decades. The impact of the American Title IX soccer/ university system's global reach prompted the sports sociologist Victoria Jackson to claim:
Women's college soccer in the U.S. is the most elite developmental league in the world. Without it, Jamaica (with 20 players with NCAA experience), [New Zealand (17)], the Philippines (17), and Canada (22), for example, would have had a much harder time sharpening the skills necessary to qualify for the [2023] World Cup. (Ibid).
However, while other countries continue to be dependent on American college soccer, in the U.S., more women are choosing to forego university soccer to play for a professional club straight out of college, a precedent set by the 2024 captain of the American National Team, Lindsey Horan, who, when a teenager went directly from high school to play with Olympique Lyonnaise in Europe. When Americans asked what college she attended, she replied, "France." While some Europeans want to experience the American way of playing football with its Title IX University soccer model, Americans like Lindsey Horan, are attracted to European football. For example, star midfielders Rose Lavelle (Wisconsin) and Sam Mewis (UCLA) played for Manchester City in England and starting 2019 World Cup team forward Tobin Heath (North Carolina) played for Arsenal in England, which defender Emily Fox (North Carolina) recently joined. Caterina Marcario (Stanford) played for Lyon Olympique and is now with Mia Fischer (UCLA) at Chelsea. However, although the lion's share of the current crop of women professional players graduated from college, the next generation may go directly from high school to join a professional club at home or overseas. (Microsoft Bing, personal communication, January 30, 2024).
The sports political scientist Andrei Markovits associates the European trend to skip college and go professional straight out of high school with Europhiles wanting American soccer programs to be like women's football in France, Germany, and Spain, with its national team winning the World Cup in 2023. That Iberian victory prompted the U.S. Soccer Federation to accelerate measures to make the American soccer system more like Europe's. The reasons given for these measures are to 1) enlarge the pool for standout football players, including infusing the team with younger players unavailable through the Title IX university pipeline, and 2) expand and strengthen the NWSL's club teams to eventually replace university as football farm clubs. European methods, the Europhiles argue, can offer more specialized and intensive coaching, competition, and experience for players who are ready and willing to dedicate themselves to the sport from an early age. Consequently, while foreign national teams that do not enjoy supportive domestic leagues will become increasingly dependent on American college soccer to excel, Americans will grow less dependent on U.S. Title IX soccer schools. According to Jackson, what made American soccer once dominant, Title IX, and its impact on sports at the university level may soon be obsolete, if not already (Markovits, 2023; Jackson, 2023).
The real reason behind the shift from university soccer programs to the NWSL professional clubs, such as the Portland Thorns, the Gotham Football Club, and Seattle's O.L. Reign, is the old capitalist gods of self-interest, money, and power. Once the financial and media worlds believed that women's football had enormous commercial potential, media, international corporations, and other financial entities began changing professional soccer more into the entertainment business, hardly the purvey of colleges and universities (Fitzgerald, 2021).
RECAPITULATION
This review argues that Title IX impacted more than gender equality and equity in sports. The legislation also changed the nature of women's soccer in the United States and globally. Before Title IX, U.S. women's football was an esoteric upper-class bourgeois flower growing organically on marginal and foreign soil. Then the Feds passed Rule 37, leaving University administrators scratching their heads about how to comply. Their attorneys recommended that colleges establish "football" programs parallel to men's football. Afterward, the visionary Anson Dorrance leveraged Rule 37 at the University of North Carolina, making the University and the National Team global football powerhouses. Among his North Carolina students were the legends Mia Hamm, Christine Lilly, and Michelle Akers, stars of the famous U.S. squad that won the World Cup in 1999. This iconic Team ushered in America's Golden Age of football that reached its zenith in 2019, when the women won their fourth World Cup in France, giving us Megan Rapinoe (University of Portland), Alex Morgan (Cal Berkeley), and Christen Press (Stanford) as peerless sport goddesses.
At that time, Jill Ellis, among the greatest football coaches, was at the helm of the 2019 squad. Ellis' greatness was not only in winning two World Cups in a row but also in her ability to win when her 2019 Team was agitating for social justice issues ranging from equal pay to supporting minority rights to promoting LBGTQ issues. When Ellis retired in October of that World Cup year, she became president of a new NWSL franchise, The San Diego Wave F.C. Her transition from staff to higher management was symbolically fitting with American Soccer shifting from the Title IX model of university and soccer symbiosis to U.S. sport's next iteration, the entrepreneurial commercial stage. This transition is producing a younger, more malleable and, as this review argues, a less educated National Team. The first version of this new squad went to the 2023 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and met utter defeat at the feet of the Swedes, America's new Nordic Valkyries.
Of the four World Cups the USWNST has won, only two stand out, the 1999 and 2019 Teams. The 1999 and 2019 World Cup winners are iconic because both squads forged their identities against formidable opposition. When U.S. Soccer told the squad in 1999 that they had to endure their lower pay, dismal training facilities, and machismo disrespect, the women threatened to strike, continued to protest, and beat the Chinese while 40 million viewers watched. At the end of the contest, all-American sweetheart Brandi Chastain awarded fans by taking off her jersey and waving it before a celebratory crowd. When asked what she felt during her celebration, she said, in retrospect, freedom and power, if not transcendence (Tang, 2021).
The 2019 World Cup team continued and completed the struggle for equal pay initiated by the 1999 team twenty years ago. In addition, the squad reshaped its identity by becoming one of the few bourgeois woke entities to successfully use its newfound freedom and power for collective causes, including social justice and LBGTQ issues. This identity emerged against varied opposition from within and without, ranging from beer-drinking white trash to the then President, burger-loving Donald Trump. How the new National Women's Soccer Team will fare and what identity it will take in its new media entrepreneurial and Europhile environment is a matter of conjecture.
This reviewer predicts that on the pitch, the new Coach, Emma Hayes, still at Chelsea (England), perhaps the most dominating club in Europe, will continue with the American style of football that relies on the ruthless attack, owing to the players' youth, speed, physicality, and endurance. Although possession football, characteristic of European teams, is not in her cards, besides focusing on youth, Hayes's shift to Europeanization will be to refine America's brute strength with superior European clinical skills and greater discipline on the pitch. She will be merciless in benching veterans and starting newer, younger, and rawer players. She could not care less about which college they went to or if they had gone to the university. The New Team will remain bourgeois and be more ethnically diverse but less so regarding the gender spectrum. The squad will be straighter, less ideological, younger, less creative, less educated, and more malleable than previous U.S. National teams. Child soldiers, as a mercenary warlord, observed, make the best killers.
Will the New Americans win the Olympics this year (2024)? They should, now that working-class England and the country bumpkin Swedes had failed to qualify. That leaves the elegant World Cup Spanish, the ectomorph German Aryans, and a resurgent multi-ethnic French team as the primary European contenders. However, do not rule out the Canadians. After all, more than half of their current players, including Jade Rose of Harvard, went to American colleges. Title IX and the Halls of Ivy may still have some old magic in the works.
REFERENCES
Carlton, G. (2021). How Title IX Impacts Women's Equality in College Athletics. Best Colleges. https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/202...
Petri, A. E. (2022). Once an 'Easy Way Out' for Equality, Women's Soccer Is Now a U.S. Force. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/sp...
Fitzgerlad, T. (2022). Forbes. The Fastest-Growing Audiences On TV Are For Woman Sports
November 8, 2022
You've probably heard Title IX thrown around with talks about equal rights and feminism. Maybe you even learned about its passage during President Nixon's administration thanks in large part to the advocacy of Patsy Takemoto Mink in Congress.
When it was signed into law Title IX made it illegal for federally funded education programs to discriminate based on sex--a ruling that would have a lasting impact on education across the country and, especially, on sports.
Gender Inequality in Sports (2022) by Kirstin Cronn-Mills details the passing of Title IX, it's lasting impact on women's sports, and how far it still has to go.
Through concise text and chapters filled photos and callout boxes about notable athletes from Billie Jean King to Serene Williams and Simone Biles, Cronn-Mills discusses the need for both equality and equity in sports to make sure that male and female athletes can be on an equal footing at every stage of their athletic careers whether that involves playing at school, the collegiate level, or in professional arenas.
While using the framing of women's sports for much of the book, Gender Inequality in Sports also makes sure to highlight the added challenges faced by athletes of color, LGBTQ+ athletes, and nonbinary athletes. In addition to breaking down intersectionality, the text also mentions some of the ways legislation for various sporting events are changing to try and accommodate these athletes in more equitable manners. Cronn-Mills also succinctly and correctly shuts down any arguments that transgender athletes should be blocked from competing as their identified gender stating clearly that trans women are women (and trans men are men) and pointing to the science that shows the idea of trans athletes having any advantage is nothing more than fear mongering by conservatives and TERFs.
Chapters detail the advent of Title IX, it's impact on sports and how its interpretation is changing to offer better protections and more inclusivity. The closing chapters explore how we can continue to move toward equality and equity in women's sports and a look at what the future might hold.
Although slim, Gender Inequality in Sports packs in a lot of information. Printed on glossy paper with full color photos, many of the spreads and callout boxes throughout have a teal background and red borders similar to the cover design. This, unfortunately, is the book's one misstep which might result in some readers needing to shift to a black and white ebook version to avoid pulsing colors on the periphery of their vision.
Back matter includes a glossary of key terms, source notes, selected bibliography, further information, index, acknowledgements, and photo acknowledgements offering plenty of options for interested readers to dig deeper.
When it was signed into law Title IX made it illegal for federally funded education programs to discriminate based on sex--a ruling that would have a lasting impact on education across the country and, especially, on sports.
Gender Inequality in Sports (2022) by Kirstin Cronn-Mills details the passing of Title IX, it's lasting impact on women's sports, and how far it still has to go.
Through concise text and chapters filled photos and callout boxes about notable athletes from Billie Jean King to Serene Williams and Simone Biles, Cronn-Mills discusses the need for both equality and equity in sports to make sure that male and female athletes can be on an equal footing at every stage of their athletic careers whether that involves playing at school, the collegiate level, or in professional arenas.
While using the framing of women's sports for much of the book, Gender Inequality in Sports also makes sure to highlight the added challenges faced by athletes of color, LGBTQ+ athletes, and nonbinary athletes. In addition to breaking down intersectionality, the text also mentions some of the ways legislation for various sporting events are changing to try and accommodate these athletes in more equitable manners. Cronn-Mills also succinctly and correctly shuts down any arguments that transgender athletes should be blocked from competing as their identified gender stating clearly that trans women are women (and trans men are men) and pointing to the science that shows the idea of trans athletes having any advantage is nothing more than fear mongering by conservatives and TERFs.
Chapters detail the advent of Title IX, it's impact on sports and how its interpretation is changing to offer better protections and more inclusivity. The closing chapters explore how we can continue to move toward equality and equity in women's sports and a look at what the future might hold.
Although slim, Gender Inequality in Sports packs in a lot of information. Printed on glossy paper with full color photos, many of the spreads and callout boxes throughout have a teal background and red borders similar to the cover design. This, unfortunately, is the book's one misstep which might result in some readers needing to shift to a black and white ebook version to avoid pulsing colors on the periphery of their vision.
Back matter includes a glossary of key terms, source notes, selected bibliography, further information, index, acknowledgements, and photo acknowledgements offering plenty of options for interested readers to dig deeper.
September 9, 2022
Skim-read for purchase preview.
I found this book to be a little heavy on one side of the discussion, not giving equal weight or voice to the idea that transgender athletes might actually have an unfair advantage. I appreciated the history and the naming of names, especially for further study. Ok for purchase. Rating: g
Recommend: topical interest.
I found this book to be a little heavy on one side of the discussion, not giving equal weight or voice to the idea that transgender athletes might actually have an unfair advantage. I appreciated the history and the naming of names, especially for further study. Ok for purchase. Rating: g
Recommend: topical interest.
March 19, 2022
Very informative, yet easy to read. I learned about title IX, equity and equality, women athletes. I would recommend to young adults or adults.
Note: I received a free ARC via Net Galley in exchange for honest review. I am voluntarily reviewing.
Note: I received a free ARC via Net Galley in exchange for honest review. I am voluntarily reviewing.
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