Women are probably never going to be equal in the male-dominated world of sport. Women’s sport simply doesn’t seem to have the prestige attributed to men’s. You only have to look at women’s football (soccer) to see that the money lies in men’s football. Television rights, sponsorship deals, recognition all seem to come a lot easier to men’s football. I’m not even a big football fan, but I could name a couple of male footballers. I couldn’t name a single female footballer, despite the fact that England’s female football team performs significantly better than the male team.

But why aren’t more people interested in watching women playing football? Perhaps because it is less aggressive, less interesting to watch, maybe. Or could it be that when sports started to become professionalized in the twentieth century it was an all-male affair. It was men who developed organisations to monitor sports, it was men who controlled how resources were spent, and it was men who formulated rules and regulations. This certainly must have had an impact. This was set aside the fact that it was regarded as unfeminine for women to want to partake in sporting activity. Sport was regarded as a male activity which women could only be spectator to. This mentality clearly lingers on, to an extent; professional sportswomen simply cannot match the standard of sportsmen for many people.

There are women who are successful in their respective sports. For instance, Serena and Venus Williams have managed to become household names by playing tennis. However, there seems to be a certain expectation for them to be sporty yet feminine; to be sex kittens on and off the court. Maybe they enjoy propagating a certain notion of femininity; posing in provocative photographs, for instance, but this doesn’t help create the idea of serious sportswomen. This also seems increasingly to be the case for men, as well, who now seem to be expected to flaunt their perfectly toned physiques for gay men and lusting women to gawp at. Luckily for them, though, they don’t have to conquer people’s expectations in the first place about what is possible for someone of their gender.

If a girl wants to become a professional in her sport, she has fewer opportunities than men, and probably won’t earn as much money as a man would. There is little that can be done to change the sports that people want to watch on television or in a stadium though. If people prefer to tune in to watch men play football, cricket or rugby, then that’s where the money will go. Thus, the situation is unlikely to change anytime soon; women’s sport, in general, will be regarded as inferior to men’s.

There are some exceptions, such as gymnastics and dancing, which seem to be considered feminine-enough sports to allow women to progress. Women are physiologically different from men, and so may not be as fast or as strong, which helps feed into the notion that women are not as worthy’ as men of holding professional status. Clearly this is not true, but whatever the largely male-controlled media wants to propagate is what goes.