Chicago Sky's Rebekah Gardner (proper) drives at Minnesota Lynx's Rachel Banham throughout second half WNBA preseason basketball motion in Toronto on May 13, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
On May 13, Canada hosted its first skilled Women’s National Basketball Association sport on the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. The Chicago Sky and Minnesota Lynx graced the hardwood courtroom, adorned with the WNBA emblem within the centre.
As a fan, a supporter of women’ and girls’s sports activities, a former collegiate athlete and a Black feminist scholar who highlights the experiences of Black women in sports activities, I couldn’t miss this sport. I used to be lucky to attend — the sport bought out the day tickets went on sale.
This sport marked many firsts within the league’s 27-year historical past: it was essentially the most watched pre-season WNBA sport and it set a pre-season attendance file of 19,923.
The sport’s success is proof there may be an urge for food for ladies’s sports activities in Canada and bodes properly for the potential for an growth of the WNBA league north of the border.
A monumental occasion
The WNBA sport offered attendees with a chance to honour gifted girls athletes. I used to be thrilled to see the throngs of enthusiastic younger women, many attending with their teammates and carrying jerseys to symbolize their favorite gamers and groups.
The excessive demand for WNBA merchandise, the range within the crowd and folks with indicators saying Toronto and Canada are prepared for a WNBA staff was unbelievable to witness.
I used to be in a position to reminisce with former teammates and coaches and focus on how this sport introduced a second of hope and chance for younger women. I noticed the sport as a monumental victory for ladies’s and women’ place in sports activities.
Fans collect earlier than the Chicago Sky and Minnesota Lynx WNBA preseason sport in Toronto on May 13, 2023.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Yet, I additionally perceive the chance it supplies for us to mirror on gender fairness in sports activities. While this was a second to get pleasure from and cherish, extra work remains to be wanted to carry girls’s and women’ sports activities to the forefront.
Women’s sport is rising
Although girls’s sport has steadily grown in Canada, it stays an untapped market. According to the Canadian Women in Sport report, the skilled girls’s sport market is estimated to be price $150 to $200 million, but it nonetheless stays underdeveloped.
Worldwide, the urge for food for ladies’s sport is rising as properly. Over half one million tickets have been bought to the upcoming 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup happening this summer season in Australia and New Zealand.
Private buyers proceed to help girls’s sports activities as properly. There has additionally been a big enhance within the quantity of ladies’s video games being broadcast.
In North America, a number of new skilled leagues have been launched, together with the Canadian skilled girls’s soccer league and the Premier Hockey Federation. These leagues supply girls the prospect to play professionally in North America.
But high-performance girls’s sports activities are nonetheless not as well-funded as males’s. The WNBA, for instance, is just comprised of 12 groups, which means many gamers aren’t given the chance to play at a excessive degree.
Struggle for gender fairness
While there have been a couple of victories for gender fairness in sports activities — essentially the most notable being the U.S. girls’s soccer staff profitable a 20-year battle for equitable pay — the wrestle is ongoing.
The Canadian girls’s soccer staff noticed their funding lower in February, a couple of months earlier than the upcoming girls’s FIFA World Cup.
Canadian soccer gamers put on purple shirts with ‘Enough is Enough’ written on them as a logo of protest in opposition to pay fairness points throughout a SheBelieves Cup match in February 2023 in Orlando, Fla.
(AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
Gender and racial discrimination, patriarchal norms, gendered stereotypes and the exclusion of women and girls from sports activities persists.
Women and women take part in sports activities and bodily exercise far lower than males and boys, and are much less prone to be coaches and leaders throughout all demographics. Sports programming for women continues to face underfunding, a scarcity of funding and systemic obstacles.
2SLGBTQIA+ athletes proceed to be underrepresented in sport. Transgender athletes and their allies have been advocating for his or her proper to take part in sports activities within the face of widespread assaults on trans rights.
The abuse and sexual harassment of ladies and lady athletes remains to be a extreme situation in Canada that isn’t taken critically sufficient.
Achieving fairness in sport
Achieving gender fairness in sports activities requires sustained, extended efforts. There are some things researchers, policymakers and sports activities organizations can do to jump-start the method.
First, researchers ought to use frameworks like intersectionality and theories like Black feminism to deal with analysis gaps in gender and fairness in sports activities. These theories centre and help the genuine tales and experiences of women and girls, and name for social justice and liberation.
Second, sport organizations ought to search to extend the illustration of Black and Indigenous girls and women inside all ranges of sport — teaching, management and participation. Black and Indigenous girls and women are among the many most underrepresented in sports activities.
Third, higher sport insurance policies are wanted to deal with the obstacles to sport participation women face from an early age. Title IX within the U.S., for instance, is a gender fairness regulation aimed toward growing participation and equal funding for ladies and women in sports activities and bodily exercise.
Lastly, gender fairness shouldn’t be the duty of ladies and women solely — everybody must be part of the method in advocating for the equitable funding of sports activities programming from center faculty via post-secondary training; from playground to skilled degree.
The WNBA sport showcased the legitimacy and immense recognition of ladies’s skilled sports activities. At the tip of the sport, the athletes acquired a standing ovation as a result of the gang collectively knew that this was greater than only a sport; it was about the way forward for girls’s sports activities.
Treisha Hylton doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.
