Women in Football
Students at Rishworth School have recently found out about the discrimination of women in
football. Newspapers dedicate more time to men’s football; they only include the women’s
teams if they participate in the World Cup or Olympics, and even then, are only included in
small sections in the middle or near the back of the paper. It isn’t only in newspapers
though, coverage of the matches are also a rare occurrence as well as interviews and being
mentioned on the daily sports news.
After a few interviews, we found out that most people don’t think that girls are properly
represented in sport; of the people we interviewed, all of them could name more male
footballers than female. Only 20% of students we interviewed could name one female
player.
When asked about yearly pay, none of the
people we interviewed could correctly guess the
right amount of money for both genders. What
they did get right though was that male players
get paid a staggering amount more money than
female players do. For example, Wayne Rooney,
the male England captain, earns around
£13,000,000 a year, while Steph Houghton, the
female England captain, earns around £65,000
yearly although £4000 of this comes from sponsorship.
We asked one of our PE teachers about her thoughts on girls’ football teams in school and
her response was, “We’d love to have a girl’s football team but we are restricted by the
amount of staff, girls and time that we have”. Other schools that do have the staff, time and
the right amount of players only have boys’ teams. Why? It might be because of the way
that we have been raised. Girls might think of football as too masculine or not for them. It’s
true, sport isn’t for everyone. But there might be a lot more people involved in sports if
there were more opportunities for both genders.
Any way you look at it, there is not enough support for the girls who are interested in having
a career in football. To get more support, we need to publicise the England women’s team
more and cover more of their matches. Also if there were more people interested in the
sport, it would become bigger and more people would know about it resulting in younger
people getting more involved with football.
In conclusion, two things need to change. Firstly, there
needs to be more publicity so that the younger generations
have role models to look to. Secondly, schools need to be
more supportive of girls’ football teams.
By Abbie and Eloise.