Megan Rapinoe strikes a shot on goal
In ballet, the more explosive athleticism of male dancers does not cause fans of ballet to diminish the value of the performances of ballerinas. The fact that women dance en pointe and male dancers do not, doesn’t cause ballet fans to diminish the value of performances by men.
Though male dancers and ballerinas have differing skill sets, underneath it all, the skills performed by men and women are very similar even if they are stylistically different.
Not only are women’s contributions to ballet not diminished due to the differences between men and women in ballet, they are arguably more loved by fans than men are loved by fans.
This is because ballet fans are acculturated to appreciate the precision of the skills employed more than the raw male centered athletic display of faster, higher, stronger.
The consequence is that while there is a gender pay gap in ballet for executive and artistic positions, there doesn’t appear to be much evidence for a pay gap between male and female dancers.
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However, in the world of sports the gap between male and female athletes grotesque. The reason? Largely, the pay gap between massive revenue differences between men’s and women’s sports leagues.
The only paths to eliminate the gap between what women athletes make in their leagues compared to men athletes make in their leagues is to
(A) eliminate capitalism (I am fine with this) and pay everybody the same regardless of the revenues their leagues bring in. There are massive revenue gaps between NBA ($8b+ per year) and WNBA ($60 million+ per year).
Or
(B) Radically begin acculturating people to appreciate aspects of sport that are not male centered.
Think of the Olympic motto: Citius - Altius - Fortius: Faster, Higher, Stronger. This sounds intuitive. Aren’t those the reasons we watch sports in the first place? We want to know who is faster, who goes higher, who is stronger?
But it is problematic. When we make those aspects of sport the central focus on sport, fans will naturally prefer men’s sports to women’s sports.
In a prepubertal world this is not problematic. Before puberty, research shows us that boys and girls perform about the same in athletics. After puberty differences begin envincing themselves. And those differences are substantial.
The men’s world record in the 100 meter dash, for example, is 9.58. The world record for women in the 100 meter dash is 10.49 seconds.
While I do believe there is be a natural fascination with knowing the answer to the questions “who is fastest?” “who jumps highest?” “who is strongest?,” I don’t believe these are necessarily the most fascinating virtues of sport.
What is? How about skill?
If we played a video in our heads of Megan Rapinoe striking a soccer ball and sending it into the back o the neck is there any inherent lack of execution of such a skill relative to Lionel Messi?
I am not yet prepared to say that Megan Rapinoe is the Messi of women’s soccer (although she damned well may be). That’s not a slight against Rapinoe. There are dozens of world’s elite men’s soccer players —- and the only one who is the Messi of men’s soccer is, well, Lionel Messi.
My comparison here is not to suggest that Megan Rapinoe’s is at Lionel Messi’s level (although she may be). But just play that video in your head: Megan Rapinoe striking a soccer ball and sending it into the back of the net. Just think of that portion of the “film” if you will.
Now do the same for Lionel Messi. Just that part of the skill: Messi striking the ball in the final 18, and sending the ball in the back of the net. Is that skill any less for Megan Rapinoe than for Lionel Messi?
No! Not “does Messi strike the ball with more power (is he stronger)?” Not “does the ball fly off Messi’s foot faster than it flies off Megan Rapinoe’s foot?”
Is the skill, technique of striking the ball, is her skill there as effective and as beautiful (well it is the Beautiful Game) as Messi’s?
What I am trying to say is “The SKILL is the SKILL.”
Let’s go back to the 100m dash. Imagine two sprinters, one male and one female. Let the films run through your head: see the sprinters launch into the dash, then watch them stride through the event, see the pronation of their their feet as they flick from step to step. Imagine both of these sprinters are as perfect in their technique as humanly possible.
Now imagine one sprinter is male and the other is female. Now run those films through your head again. As perfect as humanly possible. Forget who is faster. Instead focus on the beauty and feel the emotion of watching these near perfect sprinters as they dashed across the asphalt track to the finish line.
Aspiring boy sprinters and aspiring girl sprinters can learn the exact same lessons on sprinting in watching either of these near perfect sprinters. It doesn’t matter which was faster because both are equally near perfect. Watching the films of these sprinters in super slow motion is as instructive as the other for students of sprinting.
As we insist that the motto of sport should be Faster, Higher, Stronger, the less we will value women’s athletics. On the other hand, if we decided the motto of sport should be the SKILL IS THE SKILL, we can appreciate men and women’s athletics equally.
Imagine if this is how we acculturated children into sport? Imagine a society where we valued SKILL over raw speed, raw explosiveness, or raw strength. What if we focused on the refinement of skill.
I would proffer that we would create better athletes.
I would also suggest that we’d eliminate most of the disparity between men’s and women’s leagues in terms of revenue.
Instead of looking at an average NBA team drawing nearly 18,000 fans per game over 41 home games, commanding significantly higher ticket prices than an average WNBA team averaging 6535 fans per game over 17 home games at lower ticket prices.
Or seeing the NBA drawing a six-game championship series that averaged 7.45 million viewers per game, which was among its lowest ever, and an WNBA three-game championship series that averages 440,000 per game that was up significantly from the previous year, we would have a greater appreciation of the women’s game and see attendances and TV viewership closer to the NBAs.
So long as capitalism is the way we organize our economy the above disparities in attendance and TV ratings, and league revenues will make the case for the disparities in pay between men’s sports leagues and women’s sports leagues.
In capitalism, the argument will be made that women’s leagues are treated like men’s leagues with similar “box office numbers.”:
The last pre-pandemic season for men’s soccer league USL had an average attendance (4,476 per game) is lower than the average attendance (7,337 per game) in NWSL. Because USL teams play more home games, the difference in per teams total attendance is closer, but NWSL still leads (88,044k) vs USL (76,092).
Players make a little more money in NWSL than in USL. If you believe in capitalism that’s as close to fair pay as you are going to get until NWSL’s attendance is closer to the attendance of MLS (21,310 per game and total attendance of 362,270 per team).
So long as Citius, Altius, Fortius is the de facto motto, and primary value of the sports culture, women’s sports will be seen as inferior and as a lower level to men, and the closest women athletes will be to the glory men see will be in big national team events like the World Cup or the Olympics.
In our society we emphasize the values by which sports fans judge the worthiness of various sports and sports leagues (faster, higher stronger). Because those values emphasize the advantages of male athletes that are no fault of women’s athletes, fans of sport don’t spend as much money, nor attend and view watching women’s sports as they do with men’s sports.
If we choose to focus on strengths equally shared by men and women athletes —- the ability to perfect the skills to execute their sports —- we stand a good chance of developing a sports fan culture that values men’s and women’s sports equally.
But is it realistic that we change what we value in sports? I would argue that we already do that when it comes to “lower level” men’s sports. If you look at the attendances of the so-called P5 college football games you find out that sports fans will spend enormous money, and attend in very similar numbers as they do with the NFL.
While we don’t watch on TV as much as we watch the NFL, we watch football games in P5 conferences in extraordinary levels. Games in the SEC, for example, have as large if not larger TV audiences than pro sports leagues like Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Associationand far outpace the TV audiences of the National Hockey League.
We all know that even the greatest of college football teams would receive a drubbing if they took on even the worst of NFL teams. Faster, higher, stronger doesn’t seem to keep fans away from college football.
One likely explanation for why college football has the enormous popularity it has even as it is a “lower level” is school spirit and the pride alumni has for their alma mater. Another likely explanation for its enormous popularity, rather than the raw popularity of the sport itself, is that fans get to watch the development of players as they reach the ability to compete in the pros.
But if sports fans can tune in for these reasons instead of who is fastest, jumps the highest, or who is strongest, then there is no reason sports fans can’t come to appreciate sports simply for the excellence of the skill on display.
If we do value men’s and women’s sports equally then, even in the context of capitalism, we may finally see sports fans valuing women’s sports, spending the same money on women’s sports, and the spending same time viewing women’s sports, by acculturating sports fans to adopt a skill-focused appreciation for sports.
Think about ballet, for example. Male dancers are more athletic, female dancers are more lyrical, and dance en pointe. But the core skills are virtually identical.
The differences between male dancers and ballerinas doesn’t make ballet fans prefer one over the other. They both are equally valued for what they both bring to ballet.
If we, as sports fans, develop a skill-focused appreciation of sports, we will, like fans of ballet, equally appreciate what men and women bring to sport, and will, in the long run, spend the same money and time on women’s sports that we do on men’s sports.
