Sports are something that most people have done at least once in their life and some people have made a lifetime career from them. But what about the women who do the same thing as men but don’t receive the same amount of recognition? For example there hasn’t been a National Women’s baseball league since 1954 with the The All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGBL)  which was disbanded due to the founders not supporting feminism. There’s also no women in the Baseball Hall of Fame despite there being 340 men.

Another sport with massive diversity is football having over 346 men in the Football Hall of Fame but only four women have entered the Hall of Fame since it was created. There was also a league formerly known as the Legends Football League which made women dress provocatively and play football without pay or medical coverage.

One sport that has been the main vocal point when it comes to gender diversity is basketball and the WNBA, which gives players a salary average of $120,648 compared to the NBA’s average salary of $7.90 million. The WNBA also had a combined season viewership average of 306,000 viewers across ABC, ESPN and CBS compared to the NBA averaging over 1.44 million viewers during a 12 game stretch across the three networks. The WNBA also has less than half of the sponsors that the NBA receives with the NBA having 48 sponsors and the WNBA only having 23.

Soccer is the most watched sport in the entire world with the Premier League broadcasting in over 212 countries and having a TV audience of 4.7 billion people averaging 414,000 viewers a game in 2021. Yet in 2021, the NWSL only averaged 112,000 viewers. The pay gap between the two leagues are also very large with the average Premier Leagues salary at $81,000 a week while NWSL players earn on average $54,000 annually.

But the main sport that has been known for its inequality is golf, which has the first place salary for men in the PGA Championship is at least 1 million or more than the women’s PGA championship.

Another thing is how women are deterred from playing sports and when it comes to college sports, women have 1.3 million fewer opportunities to play high school sports than men have. Even the women that are able to play high school sports are more subjected to receiving sexist comments and being objectified by fans, commentators and even coaches.  

Until women’s sports get treated the same by men, which includes multi-variated pay and receive the same respect, there will be no change against inequality.