The Future of Women's Professional Sport - Essay Example

The Future of Professional Women’s Sports Until recently, women’s professional sports were considered by many to be a novelty at best. Yet to assume men’s sports have been widely accepted throughout a long period of time would be incorrect. In 1950, only one professional sport, major league baseball, was dominant in America. Men’s professional football, basketball, and hockey organizations were, by comparison, niche businesses (Harvard Magazine). It was only with the advent of television that interest in all men’s sports grew, for most at a fast pace starting in the 1960’s. The gap between the sexes was not simply a gender bias issue but time and distance elements factors as well. To understand where the future of women’s professional sports might be headed, it is important to understand its past and its present in terms of the challenges that have been overcome as well as the problems that remain to be faced. Prior to the 1960’s, U.S. women lived in a society that discouraged girls’ participation in sporting activities and work outside the home. Because of this, few females at the time had aspirations of sport as a career path. The women who did pursue their athletic goals were therefore not as advanced as their male counterparts and remained unprepared to take advantage of the new media. Girls’ and women’s sports received a boost in 1972 when Title IX became law. As is proved by the increase in women’s sports participation in athletics since 1972, given the opportunity to play, women and girls are just as interested in athletics as men. In 1971, only one in 27 girls participated in high school sports. By 1998, that figure had increased to one in 2.5 (“Sports Boom”, 2003). Throughout the 1990’s, the number of women competing on NCAA teams increased by 38 percent. By contrast, during the same decade, the number of male NCAA competitors increased by only 9 percent (“Response”, 2002). Not being a prominent player at the beginnings of mass media undoubtedly hurt the development of professional women’s sports as the various organizations have traditionally battled to gain the attention of the ticket-buying public. Women have proven an interest in sports. The girls who were allowed to develop an interest in sports during the past 30 years are now becoming the mothers of athletes, yet acceptance of women’s professional sports is slow. For many, it is a new concept still in an evolutionary mode. When comparing women’s sports with men’s, it is important to remember that mass participation of women in athletic games in the USA is only 30 years old - in its infancy. There will be leagues that make it and leagues that dont, just as there were mens leagues that made it and many that didnt. Men and women who grew up in the 1970s and thereafter believed that their daughters could and should play sports and become anything they wished. These parents are now the 40-50 year olds in the workforce who are attaining the seniority necessary to control the purse strings for sports sponsorships. They are also now the hiring and decision-making power in sports-related businesses. While some dinosaurs remain, most of the employment and other barriers are expected to be completely removed during the next decade or so. Title IX, though mentioned often in regards to equality in female athletics, brought about significant changes throughout the academic system. It reads, in part, “No person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid.” (“Title IX”, 1972). In 1994, women received 38 percent of all medical degrees issued in the United States, compared with 9 percent issued in 1972. Women earned 43 percent of the law degrees issued in 1994, compared with 7 percent issued in 1972. Of all doctoral degrees issued to U.S. citizens in 1994, 44 percent of them went to women, up from 25 percent issued to women in 1977 (Curtis, 2003). A quarter century after the Title IX decision, girls are finding a new wave of college opportunities. The jury remains out on whether womens pro teams can carve out more than the small niche they currently occupy in the multibillion-dollar sports business. The most critical challenge for womens pro sports will be overcoming the lack of a television package with sufficient reach to draw top corporate sponsors. Each woman’s league that fails improves the learning curve. Adding to the difficulty, there is such a glut of mens sports on television now, most under long-term contracts with huge rights fees investments on the part of the carriers, that theres no room for womens sports to grow in this critical medium. This remains a puzzle that begs to be solved. However the problem is one of corporate finances, long-term contracts and a high demand thanks to early entry into the medium. Even though the sports industry is still predominantly male and more subtle methods of discrimination remain, most of the overt barriers are down or are in the process of coming down. Since 1996, when the Atlanta Olympics served as a showcase for female athletes, promoters have launched five different womens professional sports leagues, ranging from softball to volleyball. Three have already folded and the two that remain are hanging by a thread. In addition, two womens semipro football leagues, where most players pay to be on the team and whose games are watched mostly by relatives and boyfriends, have been created in recent years (Dahlberg, 2003). Most of the womens leagues and organizations that have organized, with the exception of the Women’s NBA (WNBA), have struggled to survive. The WNBAs success is testament to the fact that womens sports have been gradually more accepted in U.S. society. Still, womens sports leagues are proving a hard sell, especially now, long after the excitement of the 1996 womens basketball Olympic gold medal and the 1999 womens World Cup soccer win in front of 90,000 fans in the Rose Bowl. The first womens professional basketball league in the United States was created in 1976. The league consisted of 8 teams. It was popular, as the average attendance of 1,200 per game suggests, and the games were televised, too. The league did not survive the following year, however, since some teams faced financial problems and the league lost large portions of its audience. In 1980 and 1984, the league made a fresh start, but neither lasted for long. Womens National Basketball Association (WNBA), which emerged in January 1997, has been doing well. The league consists of 12 teams divided into 6 Eastern Conference teams and 6 Western Conference teams. During the first year, attendance reached 1 million people in the stadium while 65 million people watched the games on television (“Women’s”, 2005). There are many countries other than the United States where womens professional basketball leagues exist, such as Italy, Germany, Spain, and Brazil. Many American players have gone overseas to play and some WNBA players still play basketball in foreign countries during WNBAs off-season. Three professional women’s football teams are currently active in the U.S. The resurgence of efforts that began in the 1960’s to make women’s American tackle football part of women’s professional sports is now alive and well. Many articles have been written about the Women’s Professional Football League (WPFL) barnstorming tour of 1965, the NWFL of Oklahoma City Dolls fame of the 1970’s, and numerous other attempts prior to the 1980’s to establish a credible and viable women’s tackle football league. It can be argued their lack of success was in their lack of regional coverage as each league had a limited number of teams representing only a small portion of the country. Recently, magazine, newspaper, radio, and television stories have flooded America with news of the emergence of the Women’s Professional Football League. There are currently 16 teams in the WPFL, with the burst of growth happening this season in 2005 (“History of the WPFL”, n.d.). The Independent Women’s Football League (IWFL) was founded in 2000 by a group of women dedicated to making the sport a household name for female athletes. The IWFL currently has 31 teams across North America from Southern California to Montreal and Oregon to Florida (“About”, 2003). The National Women’s Football Association was formed in August of 2000 with two teams and has already expanded to 28 teams for the 2006 schedule (“History of the NWFA”, n.d.). The first womens professional softball league was established in 1976, but it only lasted for four years due to dwindling finances and failure in marketing. In 1994, Womens Professional Fastpitch emerged to prepare a rebirth of the professional league, which finally came into existence with 6 teams in 1997. The teams were divided into two groups, had 66 games each year, and the winners of both groups went through a play-off series. Several games were broadcast to the general public. The league now consists of 16 teams. The six teams of the National Professional Fastpitch League (NPF) expects to average 1,000-1,500 fans per game this year. Created in 1997, NPF developed a partnership with Major League Baseball in 2002 and now has plans for expansion. NPF All-Stars has toured the country since its formation and began league play in 2004 (“League”, n.d.). Individual professional women’s sports, such as golf and tennis, have also been a marginal success and seem to have taken root in the United States. While womens tennis and golf do well at times and show a consistent number of girls taking up interest, the LPGA Tour always suffers in comparison to the riches of the mens tour. Every four years at the Olympics, womens figure skating and gymnastics are considered two of the most popular sports. The LPGA Tour was founded in 1950 and chartered in 1951. In the 1960’s, the LPGA began to find its feet as women in sports gradually gained more acceptance. The numbers of tournaments and prize money are still scarce, but golf industry manufacturers step to the fore to help with the continued establishment of an organized tour for women golf professionals. The LPGAs first television coverage gave this growth a healthy boost in 1963. It was televised along with the final round of the U.S. Women’s Open Championship. The first tournament to have national television coverage of all four rounds was the 1982 Nabisco Dinah Shore. By the end of the 1960s, prize money had grown to $600,000 and the schedule offers 34 events. Annual LPGA Tour prize money reached $4.4 million in 1979 and reached $14 million in 1989. By 1996, annual tour prize money was more than $25 million (Tekware, 1997). Professional women are flourishing in tennis, basketball, softball and even football but other attempts to bring women’s athletics to the professional arena have not been as productive. The Womens Professional Volleyball Association was established in 1986. The association organized professional six-player indoor volleyball leagues and beach volleyball leagues, such as Budlight Pro Beach Volleyball League in 1997, in which four teams participated. The association finally dissolved in April of 1998 after experiencing little to no growth. The eight-team Women’s United Soccer Association debuted in April 2001 with a Washington Freedom game that drew 34,148 fans, a number that has not been seen since. The association played its final game 2004. The financial backing did not continue to support the league after the WUSAs third season and the announcement was made in 2003 that the league was suspending its operations immediately. A group of former league officers joined with the Players Association to revive the WUSA in 2004, but that effort has of yet not been fruitful. Women’s USA soccer players made about $25,000 - $85,000 per season, while the average salary is around $40,000. Some original players from the U.S. National soccer team make around double the average (B., 2004). In 1994, a businessman in Atlanta struck a $3 million sponsorship deal with Coors and formed a womens professional baseball team called Colorado Silver Bullets. About 20 members were selected from 1,300 baseball players nationwide for this team. The Bullets played games with mens semiprofessional teams and regional teams. In 1997, when the Ladies League Baseball was born and it included four teams, the Bullets fought with them. The Ladies League Baseball changed its name into the Ladies Pro Baseball and added two teams into the league in 1998. However, after the first month, the league had been suspended, being faced with financial difficulties of its sponsors. The Bullets have not operated since 1998 as Coors terminated its contract. Surveys by New York-based Scarborough Sports Marketing show that only 4 percent of men say they follow womens soccer even casually, while just 6 percent have an interest in the WNBA. The LPGA fares a little better at 8 percent, but its had a half-century to build even that audience. By contrast, 31 percent of women say they are NFL fans and 28 percent say they follow major league baseball. The active female is now a hot new participant market whose size is equal to the relatively stagnant mens market for sporting goods and apparel. Since 1991 women have out-purchased men in athletic shoes and apparel. The NHL, MLB, NHL, NASCAR and the NFL have all established special units to market to the new female consumer and they are all hiring women to give them an edge in understanding the needs of this market. Close to forty percent of the consumers of mens professional sports are women attending games, watching on television and purchasing licensed products. Women have been given the chance to play, understand the game and have developed into just as passionate a spectator as her male counterpart. The sports industry now believes that women customers will make up fully half of their business so women are increasingly accepted in mens sports. Many women are working in professional mens league and franchise offices in jobs that were previously dominated by men. From JC Penney to Evian, there are many major corporations outside the sporting goods manufacturing world that realize 70-80 percent of their consumers are women who no longer view themselves as the stereotypical sex objects. This female consumer has become more active over the past two decades, stronger and more confident. Corporations, seeking to appeal to the female consumer, are developing messages that appeal to this more active woman. They are using professional and Olympic female athletes as inspirational advertising images. They are hiring female employees in their sports marketing units and beginning to put money and female employees behind womens sports events. In sports business, women are frequently found in public relations positions, but rarely find their way to the boardroom. Learning from the past failures, the management of women’s sports organizations must be able to attract more spectators to womens professional sports, in order for female professionals to have a chance at success in a variety of sports and for womens sports to permeate the whole society. Once the organizations and systems are formed to pave the way for further acceptance, the next step will be to take a substantial action to correct some of the issues that prevent women from entering sports to begin with, such as low or no salaries. In professional athletics, the average NBA salary in 1999-2000 was 58 times higher than the average WNBA salary – $3.17 million and $55,000 respectively. Professional female tennis players make 67 cents for every dollar a male player makes – the number drops to 36 cents in professional golf. In collegiate athletics, women make up only nine percent of sports information directors, 25 percent of all head athletic trainers, 34 percent of athletic administrators, two percent of the team coaches on male teams and 46 percent of team coaches for female teams (Murray, n.d.). The statistics are as abundant as they are startling. Parity remains a rarity both in terms of opportunities and compensation in the world of sports careers. Why is the pay gap increasing in a society that constantly preaches equality and meritocracy and supposedly abides by legislation that mandates it? Explanations vary greatly by profession and source. The obvious conclusion to make is systematic discrimination. Archaic perceptions of a woman’s value in sports and in the workplace still linger in the depths of America’s judgment; thereby continuing practices of job segregation, sex discrimination and gender-biased pay scales. Eighty percent of college athletic programs remain out of compliance with Title IX — 30 years after it was passed. Colleges must award female athletes a proportion of their athletics-scholarship budgets that matches the proportion of women on varsity teams on a head-count basis if women’s sports programs are to be given a chance. Of course, if you ask the people in the business, they’ll tell you the problem is never inequitable treatment of female athletes, but rather a lack of interest or the impossibility of restructuring men’s sports budgets. Excluding a few sports, such as tennis, ice skating and gymnastics, low salaries and unequal publicity are some of the problems that many professional female athletes still face. Works Cited “About the IWFL.” 2003. The Official Site of the Independent Women’s Football League. November 29, 2005. B., Robert. “Men’s vs. Women’s Professional Soccer Salaries.” 2004. Everything-Soccer.com. November 29, 2005. Curtis, Mary C. “About Title IX.” October 22, 2004. Gender Equity in Sports. November 29, 2005. Dahlberg, Tim. “Women’s Pro Sports: Not for Wimps.” June 18, 2003. CBS News. November 29, 2005. “History of the WPFL.” n.d. Women’s Professional Football League: The Official Site of the Women’s Professional Football League. November 29, 2005. “History of the NWFA.” n.d. NWFA National Women’s Football Association. November 29, 2005. “League History at a Glance.” n.d. National Pro Fastpitch. November 29, 2005. Murray, Sarah J. “Posting Up in the Pink Ghetto.” n.d. Women’s Sports Foundation. November 29, 2005. “Response to National Wrestling Coaches Association Title IX Suit Against the Educational Department.” January 17, 2002. Women’s Sports Foundation. November 29, 2005. Tekware, S.A. “A History of the LPGA Tour.” 1997. World Golf. November 29, 2005. “Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972.” 1972. U.S. Department of Labor. November 29, 2005. “The Women’s Sports Boom.” 2003. National Pro Fast Pitch. November 29, 2005. “Women’s National Basketball Association.” November 25, 2005. Wikipedia: The Online Encyclopedia. November 29, 2005. Author: Sarah J. Murray Womans Sports Federation.org http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/cgibin/iowa/issues/disc/article.html?record=884 (undated) Retrieved 11/28/2005 Read More