As players prepared for the biggest tournament of their lives, the controversy highlighted gender inequalities in college sports.
The treatment of men and women in college sports has long been a topic of discussion regarding gender inequality. Many other examples of gender disparities within the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have remained hidden for years, but new discoveries at the most recent NCAA Tournament have brought the issue back into the spotlight.
Last month, University of Oregon women’s basketball sophomore Sedona Prince posted a video on the social media app TikTok that went viral. This video had approximately 7 million views as of publication, and features a comparison between the men’s and women’s basketball weight rooms during the NCAA March Madness tournaments. The women’s weight room only consisted of a weight rack and a few yoga mats, while the men’s restroom had access to an entire gym filled with squat racks, dumbbells, and other equipment.
After numerous images surfaced on social media showing the drastic differences between the women’s and men’s facilities in Texas and Indiana respectively, the NCAA apologized for causing inconvenience to female athletes and modernized the women’s weight room.
“We have not been successful this year in what we have done to prepare over the last 60 days for 64 teams to be here in San Antonio, and we recognize that,” said Lynn Holzman, NCAA vice president of women’s basketball.
Part of the issue is that the NCAA has a committee that focuses on Title IX – of which the Women’s Basketball Coach Association (WBCA) is also a part – but they have been left out of the game recently. They speak out when these issues are raised, but remain frustrated at having been excluded from any decision.
Title IX States“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination in any educational program or activity benefiting from federal financial assistance.” This applies to any institution receiving federal financial assistance from the U.S. Department of Education.
Val Ackerman, founding president of the WNBA and currently commissioner of the Big East Conference, called the WBCA “fragmented and frustrating” because every time it reported instances of inequality, there was never any change.
“It’s a Tower of Babel”, Ackerman said. “Trying to bring the right people to the table and get consensus on who you trust to make the right decision is really a challenge. »
According to According to ESPN, the 2018-19 NCAA Division I men’s tournament had a budget of $28 million, almost double the women’s budget of $15.5 million. The NCAA provided additional information showing a men’s net income of $864.6 million that season and that the women’s event lost $2.8 million, the largest loss of any NCAA championship .
Women’s basketball does not bring in the same amounts of money, perhaps in part because, despite the growing number of women’s sporting events, their media coverage remains very minimal. Women represent almost 40% of all athletes. Yet, according to According to a study by the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, women received only 4% of sports media coverage. Women are not shown as much as men on television or any other media, leading to lower incomes that make it difficult to improve financially.
“One of the things we can do right now is call these tournaments ‘the men’s basketball tournament’ and ‘the women’s basketball tournament,'” said Muffet McGraw, former women’s basketball coach at Notre Dame. “When you turn on the TV and you look at the guide, it just says NCAA Basketball Tournament, and of course that just means men’s tournament. The NCAA runs two social media accounts, one called March Madness, the other called The Final Four, and of course, they’re both male. They don’t say it.
After the most recent incident with Prince and the gyms, the NCAA hired a law firm to help review all championships in all divisions. Financial evaluations are underway and they are also trying to identify “any other gaps that need to be filled, both qualitatively and quantitatively, to achieve gender equality. »
When considering the complexity of college sports, the NCAA faces many deep-rooted organizational problems. Nonetheless, the NCAA clearly has several different avenues and approaches to improving women’s athletics.
Without Prince’s video and the scrutiny and public attention it brought to the NCAA, it would not have given women proper facilities at the biggest tournament of the year. This experience has inspired many people, not just women, to have the courage to fight for justice and fairness.
“I think it’s a wake-up call that probably needed to happen. I think it’s going to spark more change,” Ackerman said.
Written by: Katherine Raygoza —[email protected]
