Attendance at at University of Michigan NCAA women’s basketball game
While great strides have been made in terms of granting women equality in our country, we have yet to reach equality in all aspects of our culture. One such aspect which lacks equality to women is the world of sports. While women are able to play college sports such as basketball and softball, the attendance at their games is mediocre. Additionally, attendance at WNBA games is even worse as the average number of attendants per game for the Phoenix Mercury (which led the WNBA in regard to attendance) was a measly 9,155 people in the 2014 season. That may seem to be a relatively large number, but compare that to to the Michigan men’s NCAA basketball team which had an average attendance of 12,138 people per game during the 2013 season, and the difference is clearly evident. It does not make sense that a professional level of basketball should be less popular than a collegiate level game on such a large scale. However basketball is not the only sport in which fans display inequality toward women.
Look at all of those fans!!
This past summer, during a camp trip, I attended an MLB game between the Baltimore Orioles and St. Louis Cardinals. Despite that the game was played on a weeknight, fans coming from all over the city of Baltimore, and beyond (such as my camp group), filed into the stadium in order to support the Orioles. The game was a simple regular season matchup that truly did not mean much to either team’s season, yet fans still decided to go to the game. Similarly, the men’s college basketball game that I attended roughly two weeks ago, between Michigan and Bucknell, had a very similar feel. The game was incredibly crowded, meanwhile the game boring as it was an easy (expected) win for Michigan against a school in Bucknell which has a very mediocre basketball program.
After watching each game and reading the chapter “Being a Woman and Other Disabilities” from the book of our own Professor LeVaque-Manty (there is no online version of this chapter, so instead I give you a picture of the popular professor), I thought about the frustration that women must feel regarding the inequality they face in both of these sports. While talented male college athletes, playing basketball and baseball, are able to look forward to a high level of professional athletics following college (such as the MLB), there is no such thing for women. While the WNBA is a legitimate professional sports league, it does not at all compare to the level of competition in the NBA. Additionally, there is no parallel female league to the MLB. Therefore, the closest thing to the MLB for women is a professional softball league, National Pro Fastpitch, which has four teams, has very few if any fans, and is a complete and utter joke.
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National Pro Fastpitch is an unheard of, joke of a league.
One may say that fans do not enjoy attending female sports due to a lack of talent; playing into the argument given in “Being a Woman and Other Disabilities.” However, that argument is simply invalid. There are plenty of talented female athletes such as Britney Griner, Maya Moore, and Mo’ne Davis who are not/ will not be able to showcase their talents due to a lack of opportunity and attention. The fact that the average attendance for a WNBA playoff game in 2013 was roughly 7575 people per game is a joke, and simply goes to show that we are not giving equal opportunity and attention to females with immense talent (such as Maya Moore who actually won the 2013 WNBA Finals with the Minnesota Lynx). Therefore it is utterly unfair that fans will attend pointless MLB and NCAA men’s basketball games, and will not even care about professional female sports, as we are missing out on loads of talent that will not be able to be seen otherwise.
Mo’ne Davis making a male batter whiff on a swing
Touchdown Theory 
Interesting read on women’s sports, ties well with Mika’s chapter. I never really attended many women’s sports events but after reading and seeing that horrible attendance, I’m more or less compelled to go. I kinda wish you dug more into how we should go about this lack of support and participation, I felt like I was just given a report on how things are going rather than getting the intent of the blog -which I hope was trying to bolster some support for women’s sports. Given that you picked this topic as your blog, I expect you have high esteem for women’s sports but I was disappointed to see that little of that was shown… after all, readers can pick up on the author’s enthusiasm. Nonetheless, I think the facts you pose are strong enough for people to come to their own conclusions -all I wanted was a bit of a heads-up kind of thing in the end to advocate change :P overall, nice blog -thanks for the info!
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I think this debate about women’s sports and inequality is very interesting. Unlike in 1900s, women now can pursue their careers in the professional sports, but, as many people have mentioned this, women’s sports do not receive as much attention as it should get. Whether this is unfair or not is hard to define because I don’t believe that people don’t watch the sports just because women play the sports. Also, we need to consider basic human instinct to stay in past cultures. In this consideration, we can see why people still watch football although they may not find it interesting. In this sense , we must not just argue that less audience for women’s sports demonstrate the inequality because people are just used to watching men’s basketball games. But, after all, this debate should continue!
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I honestly believe that the reason female professional sports aren’t as popular as male professional sports is because that is what we have always known. People didn’t grow up watching some amazing play of a women’s basketball league or talking about the incredible world series of the women’s softball league. It is possible to bring about change and allow for women’s sports to become more popular and allow for the talented women athletes a field to play on after college, but it will take a lot of work and advertisement to change people’s perception about women’s sports.
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Being a lifelong female athlete, this subject really hits home with me. During my high school softball career, my teammates and I would watch our friends pass our field and continue onwards to the baseball field a few hundred feet away. We had a better record and were playing our biggest rival, so why wouldn’t they come watch us? Even though the inclusion of women’s sports within high school, college, and even professional communities has been fairly recent, I think that there should be a larger fan considering the rapid feminist movement that has occurred over the past century or so. I believe that in order to generate interest in professional women’s sports, efforts must be made at lower levels in order to generate interest. I’ve seen a large amount of posters advertising women’s basketball and volleyball around campus, however, it is somewhat degrading when there is print underneath that reads “free admission”. Attendance at women’s sporting events will only grow when the American people will break ties with the long-held belief of male superiority.
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