While Title IX ensures that male and female athletes have equal funding, access to facilities and opportunities to play, the law is powerless against influencing people's preferences. Whether it is attending games, watching teams on television or buying a specific player's gear, Americans disproportionately tend to support male athletes and teams over their female counterparts.
Today, there are not nearly as many opportunities to attend women's games, since many sports have eliminated professional female leagues. Almost all elementary school-aged kids play soccer, girls and boys alike, so how is it that we cannot sustain enough support for a women's soccer league just as large as the men's? With only eight professional women's soccer teams, less than half the number for the men, female athletes just do not have the same chance to play at the highest level. How is it fair that little girls can't have the same dream of being a professional athlete that boys have? Softball only has four professional teams across the country and field hockey does not have a professional league.
Nobody can argue against the fact that women's sports bring in less revenue than men's sports, but this is both the cause and effect of a vicious cycle. With less revenue coming in, budgets dry up, teams are cut and leagues disappear. As numbers decline, fans' associations with women's sports become weaker, further exacerbating the downward spiral.
Every fall Sunday, many American families watch hours of football on one of the big networks, but you may have to click all the way up in the channels to ESPNU or obscure cable channels to find a women's competition being televised. This is the same phenomenon we saw before, with the direct relationship between television coverage and popularity widening the gap between the popularity of men's sports and the shrinking interest in women's teams.
The number of girls and women buying and wearing Cristiano Ronaldo jerseys is not even comparable to the small number of men and women combined who sport Mia Hamm jerseys. While Real Madrid has much greater exposure and popularity than the Washington Freedom ever did, Hamm and the rest of the women gained significant exposure when she was part of the national team. Making the argument that Ronaldo is a better athlete than Hamm is irrelevant, since it is like comparing apples to oranges.
Many argue that men's sports are more exciting to watch, which may be valid. Football, wrestling and boxing are physical contests, with high risks of injury. People love watching athletes take hard hits, crumple to the ground and rebound just as quickly, as spectators get a thrill from the danger of sports. But there is no reason that women's sports cannot be physical as well.
If men's lacrosse is more exciting to watch than women's because of the increased physical play, then why have we created rules that set the women's game behind from the get go? Men are biologically more aggressive, but the message being sent seems to be that female athletes cannot handle the amped-up aggression and physicality of the men's game. Even if the women's game were as physical as the men's, we are not convinced that the women's teams would receive the same support base.
These nationwide tendencies to attend, watch and support men's teams over women's seem to extend to Dartmouth as well. This past weekend, the men and women's soccer teams both had home Ivy League openers against Princeton University on a beautiful fall evening. As the whistle blew to end the men's game, the student and fan sections emptied, only to be re-filled to half the same capacity for the women's game. The location, the rules and the sport stayed the same, but the level of support certainly changed.
There is not much that can be done about this. Male sports will always be more widely popular, and we are not sure if we will ever be able to pinpoint exactly why this is the case.
