When men are just better
Calls for more coverage of women's endeavours miss the mark in the objective world of sport
Zoe Williams
Wednesday July 26, 2006
The Guardian
The nation's sportswomen all seem to be mobilising in the pursuit of equality this week. It would have to be elite athletes, since the rest of us are way too hot. In the world of football, 10-year-olds are petitioning Tessa Jowell to change FA rules that require all girls to be booted out of mixed teams by the age of 11 (the rule appears to be that the later segregation is brought in - in Australia it happens in the mid-teens - the better the women's adult sides go on to be). Meanwhile the Women's Sports Foundation has brought out its media-watch report, which includes droll facts such as "women command 1.5% of print coverage", and, my particular favourite, "BBC Sports Online athletics page leads with Jason Gardner failing to qualify for the 60 metres final when Kajsa Bergquist had just broken the world indoor high-jump record". WSF finishes with some rather frustrated tips for improving media coverage of women's sport. "Ensure no Premiership or international football is taking place anywhere ... Hope that there will be a British success ... Encourage your sportswomen to have something to say - the cheekier the better!" What kind of cheeky? Should they swear? Pull Gary Lineker's ears?
That's beside the point; this sporting world is not fair. It is not the kind of unfairness that two sides could argue about, each using the statistics differently to its advantage. This is crazy unfair - when you try to draw a graph of male to female sporting coverage, you have to tweak the scale just to get them both on the same page.
The media make all the difference in the world, furthermore, since sports that get no coverage command no sponsorship, thereby limiting participation to those who can independently afford it. So you might get girls cropping up in dressage or tennis or suchlike - since it is, I believe, possible to be both posh and coordinated (though you'd never guess from the way they dress) - but by narrowing the sample like this we pointlessly limit our potential for excellence.
And yet it's worth wondering what our goals should be. Take, as a correlative to the sporting world, the art world: women in the visual arts earn 5% of what men do, and their gallery representation isn't far off that, so it's not a bad comparison. Where the equivalence disappears, though, is in critical appraisal: the idea of a "gendered eye" - that a response the critic believed to be objective and neutral was informed by the misogynist standards of the time - is familiar enough now to make a difference to the way art is collected and evaluated, even if it hasn't yet made enough difference.
In sport no such subjectivity exists. Unless you start shooting barbiturates into your eyeballs, the measures and judgments of sport are utterly transparent and objective. Who is the fastest and who is the strongest? I can think of a really good way to work this out - let's get those ones to run somewhere, and those other ones to pick up heavy things. Job done. Yes, women can play football and cricket, and I'm sure the standards they attain would astound us all, since we never see them on the telly; but we are still dealing with pursuits at which men are better, and not because they've had more practice or more sponsorship. To insist that women get the same airtime as men is to insist that people are as interested in watching them; given that people watch this stuff for the spectacle of physical excellence, naturally they want to watch the most excellent, the fastest and the biggest.
The rather coy, Enid Blyton-ish insistence that you deserve attention just for being plucky, for achieving as much as you could possibly achieve, regardless of where you stand in relation to the best, is infantilising. It's the kind of attitude that leads people to encourage grown women to be "cheeky". It's not what equality is about at all