Women invisible when it comes to sports media

By Amielle Christopherson

If you stand in front of a magazine rack in any grocery store, bookstore, airport kiosk or newspaper stand and count the number of sports magazines, you’ll come up with a number running into the hundreds. That’s not counting the magazines that aren’t being carried. However, if you were to look over the covers of any of those magazines and count the number of female athletes taking centre stage, you’d come up with, well, most likely zero.

Not that that’s out of the ordinary. From the beginning of the Ancient Olympics in Greece, women were banned from even viewing the events. It wasn’t until 1900 that women were allowed to take part, and in considerably less sports as the men did.

Even with the Olympics, the glory of sportsdom, and allowing women to compete, it wasn’t until the 1990s that women’s professional sports teams achieved any sort of popularity.

It’s been 20 years since then, and still women aren’t on even footing in the sports world. The Canadian Women’s Hockey League  was founded in the 1990s with the current incarnation beginning in 2007.  Up until the 2010-11 season, each of the players had to pay $1,000 to play. Everyone involved in the league, from the players to the staff, works pro bono, their love of the sport their payment, while working other jobs to make up for what they don’t make.

Taking the issue out of the professional leagues, the U-18 women’s teams also has a long way to go. Every year, there’s the World Junior Hockey Championships, held for both U-18 men and women.

The attention, however, is put almost entirely on the men’s tournament. Fans everywhere expressed rage, sadness, or shame when Canada lost to Russia to play the United States for the bronze medal on Jan. 3. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr were filled with posts, tweets and tags expressing thoughts on the men losing.

Yet, four days later, barely anything was said about the fact that the Canadian women’s U-18  team won gold at their tournament in the Czech Republic 3-0 against the U.S.

This year sees the induction of a new sport in the Olympics for women: boxing.   However, the Amateur International Boxing Association doesn’t seem quite as ready for women to step into the 21st century. They’ve put forward what they call ‘a suggestion’ for women to wear skirts instead of the traditional shorts.

Their reasoning is that it would help make the boxers look more ‘elegant’ and help to ‘distinguish’ female boxers from their male counterparts.  Not only can females look elegant in articles of clothing that aren’t short skirts, but the simple fact that men are, for the most part, shirtless, during their fights should help with distinguishing. If that’s not enough, there’s quite a difference between a male and a female’s physique, even if that woman is a boxer.

Not only would it undermine all the hard work these women have put into their sport, it could also have some negative influences. Fighting in a uniform that they’re not comfortable in could directly affect their performance, as well as their safety.

The examples don’t stop there. There’s women’s soccer and the struggle with the Women’s Professional Soccer association because they don’t have enough support for more than six teams and lack of funding. Women’s basketball and the lack of viewers and supporters they have, despite being in operation for more than a decade, 12 teams, and three TV stations that broadcast it.

Maybe fans don’t realize there are teams and associations dedicated to female athletics. Maybe if they did, there’d be more of a demand for equal funding and equal treatment. But fans will never realize there are teams out there if there’s not the funding to keep up the teams and promote them.