Project 1

Project 1 draft

Introduction

The purpose of this group research is to find out our participant’s opinions on the issue of inequality in sports and to take a deeper look into this issue. This issue is important because of how long it has affected not only America but the entire world. What inspired us tostart researching this topic was the constant talk about it on the news. This summer is was talked about more than usual because the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team won the world cup, and had multiple players speak out against the inequality issue. We just wanted to see what people's opinions and knowledge on the topic were. For years there have been rights that women have either not had or have had to fight much harder for, although this statement holds true for more than just women of the world. In an article by Ara wilson, she asks the question if “whether biological measures associated with males and females should even provide the basis for determining who can complete in sex-segregated female sports” (Wilson 1). There have been different forms of solutions to this inequality problem, with one of them being creating an all female team for each sport that currently only have all male players. Another form of a solution is for sports like basketball during events like celebrity games where female and male athletes will compete against each other. We did research in order to find more solutions to this issue and to see what people think about it.

Methods

Our methods included creating the topic and making our survey brainstorming and writing up the questions. After developing the questions, we searched for articles and sources for some of our questions. After analyzing and citing these sources, we began to make more questions. The questions ranged from multiple choice and short discussion, and the multiple choice had answers that had an answer choice for almost every possible answer to the questions. We made our survey on www.qualtrics.com. This site was able to help us make the survey and give us our data for our graphs. After the questions were completed and the survey was published, we began to share the survey through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even through emails. We also went around campus and asked some people to take the survey we made. Another way we shared it was by sending out the link to friends to have them take it. We also looked at other examples of our topic and compared our results to what they got. We launched our survey and asked participants questions related to the topic of inequality in sports. Of the people that we surveyed, 62% were female, and 38% of the participants were male. All but one of the participants was a U.S. citizen. 86% of the respondents were from ages 18-24, 3.5% were 25-34, 7% were 35-44, and 3.5% were 35-54. We had no one over the age of 54 take our survey. 77.4% of the participants were white or caucasian, 10.5% were black or African American, 5.3% were Hispanic or Latino, 1.8% were Native American or American Indian, and 5.3% chose “other.”

Results

We got a lot of interesting results from our surveey. Some were expected, and some were not. What shocked us the most about the results of our survey, was that 55% of the people we surveyed said that they were not educated on the issue of inequality in sports. This came as a big shock to us becuase a big reason on why we chose this topic was because of how much it was talked about on the news. We expected probably about 60% or more of the people we surveyed to be educated on this issue. This came as a huge surprise to us.

Another surprising piece of information was that almost half of the participants responded that they have experienced inequality in sports. We found this to be surprising because more than half of the participants said tat they were not educated on the topic. We hypothesized that most of the people that said they were educated on the issue, have likely experienced it. We believe that this is a problem that almost half of our 44 participants have experienced inequality in sports.

People's Opinion

As you can see by the graph on the left, most of the participants believe that there is inequality in sports. We thought it was interesting that more male participants believe that there is not inequality in sports. We believe it is like this because males do not go through as much inequality as females do. We put in the answer choices of "probably not" and "probably yes," for people that feel there is some inequality but not a lot we put the answer choice "might or might not" for people who dont really have an opinion on the matter.

Sports Fans

As you can see by the graph on the left, almost half of the participants are sports fans. This shows that most of the people we surveyed will most likely know about or have heard about the inequality situation in sports. We found it intersesting that there are almost twice as many females that were surveyed than males, but there are still more male sports fans that are "definitley" sports fans.

More Results

As you can see in the graphs above, and as stated earlier, there are a lot more females that were surveyed than males. Out of the people that we surveyed, 38.9% of them believe that gender inequality is the most abundant form. This is over 25% of any of the other options which included, class (2.8%), insitutional (11.1%), and racial (8.3%). This was not a shock to our group as we also believed that gender inequality was the most abundant form. This is the most talked about form of inequality in sports. It was all over the news this past summer with the U.S Women's National Soccer team winning the World Cup. This sparked a lot of controversy and was one of the main reasons we wanted to research the issue of inequality in sports, and find out what the people's opinions were on it. Most of our participants were white females. We believe that if the survey takers were evenly split between male and female, than we might have had some different results. We belive our results might have been a little different becuase, even though most of our participants were white females, there were still more men that were "definitley" sports fans.

Discussion

A lot can be gathered from the results from what we and others more experienced on the field found. One thing that was notable was a consensus that the root can lead to it being discrimination by Governments and/or Institutions as expressed by many articles including "Sex in Sport." by Doriane Lambelet Coleman, but she also noted that discrimination based on race and sex is "often not based on institutionally relevant grounds, but rather on subordination norms, false factual assumptions and stereotypes, or comparatively weak interests. Because of this, and because many societies have made an affirmative commitment to the anti-subordination project in particular, policy choices that involve race and sex classifications are singled out as categorically suspect and necessitating careful scrutiny." (page 68) What should be regarded when looking at these results and other findings is that various levels determine of discrimination in sports, but that it is being handled as Coleman detailed in her findings," In institutional settings that retain the classifications, where going sex-neutral is either not possible or else a disfavored policy, there is a growing movement to replace the word and idea of “sex” with the word and idea of “gender” which is understood here to mean gender identity. This effort may be based in the view that sex is not binary so that sorting people this way is bad policy. It may also reflect the sense that using the word and idea of “sex” inappropriately excludes people whose gender identity does not match their biology. The Obama Administration’s decision beginning in late 2015 to read out “sex” and read in “gender identity” in its interpretation and enforcement of United States anti-discrimination laws is illustrative of both perspectives." ( Page 63}. Some may however believe that that may not be enough since there are numerous articles pertaining to a wage gap between male and female athletes an example being from Collin Flake, Mikaela Dufur, and Erin Moore called "Advantage Men: The Sex Pay Gap in Professional Tennis" where according to the authors' findings, "Upon first glance, there appears to be mixed evidence of a sex pay gap in professional tennis. When we only considered sex and career achievements, a considerable pay gap emerged... We found that when female tennis players are most visible, they are paid the same as males, but middle- and low-tier tournaments have substantially smaller payouts for women than men." (page 372-373} This may lead to the notion that while the larger. more televised events are better at handling inequality, the lower and middle level institutions do not handle it as well. As to why this is the case, that can be due to various reasons like financial reasons, or simply reasons like sex or race are more open to discrimination in those areas.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we had results that we were expecting and some we were not expecting. Fortunately, the majority of our survey participants are aware of this issue. But also, are overall results of our survey should not be assumed as the general population because the majority of our participants were young, female, and caucasian. We learned many things about what people believe is going on with inequality in sports and what people think the solution should be. Our findings really helped us understand how others view our topic. We expected almost all the people we surveyed to think that there was inequality in sports, but only 45.3% did. We expected this number to be in the high 60's at least. We also expected that most people would believe that gender inequality was the most abundant form, but only 38.9% believed that it was. We expected this because that is the most talked about form of inequality on the news. I think that more people would have chose gender if more than 45% of the participants were educated on the issue. we also expected more people to be educated on this issue with how much it was talked about on the news. We believe that the reason that not as many people experienced it as we thought would, was because the majority of the people we surveyed were from the ages 18-24. We believe that more of our participants would have been educated on the topic if they had been older. It was easier for us to reach out to people our age, and we believe that could have given us different results than if we would have reached out to an older audience. Overall this group research was full of surprises and was very fun to do.

Work Cited

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Flake, Collin R, et al. “Advantage Men: The Sex Pay Gap in Professional Tennis.” Galileo.usg.edu/, 2013, eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=9&sid=cccec9a0-8c0e-4a8d-9795-aaba4c392ea5%40pdc-v-sessmgr04&bdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPWlwLHNoaWImc2l0ZT1lZHMtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=87909101&db=edb.

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