Assignment task: I expect you to complete at least 3 actions each week. An action can be a question, a comment, an answer, some context you looked up and wanted to add - each of these is an annotation, and therefore an "action". Additionally, each of your "actions" should be:
- Constructive: It's made in good faith to build up and add value to the people reading the text. It can be a question, answer, or informative comment. Good questions cannot be answered in a few words and might help someone else with a similar question or another student looking to make a comment. Good answers are thoughtful. Good arguments are productive, allowing for the possibility of misunderstanding on all sides, creating spaces for further understanding
- Considerate: At no point will a student be the target of a dismissive or otherwise negative comment; a failure to respectfully engage in this process will negatively impact your grade.
- Substantive: It is more than a very short reply. "I agree," or "Why?" will not count toward your three actions, though you can post any number of smaller annotations as you would like. They just won't count for your "three actions."
Additional suggestions for your annotations:
- Answer a question from the instructor or another student
- Pose a question for other students to answer
- Identify a key term and provide a definition; the definition can be paraphrased or quoted from the current reading, paraphrased or quoted from other course material (cite the source), or paraphrased or quoted from outside sources (cite the source)
- Identify an idea you find interesting or surprising (and tell us why)
- Identify an idea you agree with (and tell us why)
- Identify an idea you disagree with (and tell us why)
- Identify a concept or point that you do not understand (first tell us what you do understand and then ask for clarification on what you do not understand)
- Provide information or a link that would enhance other students' understanding of the material (images, memes, GIFs, and other links to outside sources are encouraged!)
Additional instructions:
- Make exactly three annotations
- Each annotation should be about one to three sentences long. If you post an image or link, just give a one sentence description of how it relates to the text you highlighted
- Each annotation must be substantive, adding to our collective work of understanding the reading (e.g. "I agree" is not a sufficient annotation)
- An annotation can include annotating a new segment of text and annotating it OR replying to a question or comment in an annotation from the instructor, TA, or another student
- If a comment or question has already been addressed, you can still give another answer if you are adding something new
- Comments must be respectful to individuals and groups.
- We are all here to learn. Please "call in" rather than "call out" misinformed and/or offensive comments by explaining the issue to the original poster (and to other students who will read the comment).
Title IX has dramatically increased the number of sport opportunities for girls and women in educational institutions. According to data collected by the National Federation of State High School Associations, in 1971 (just prior to the passage of Title IX), 294,105 girls participated in high school sports. By 2009- 2010, that number had grown to 3,172,637. R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter, authors of an ongoing, longitudinal study, found that female participation at the collegiate level has increased six-fold, from 30,000 in 1977 to more than 180,000 in 2010. In short, girls and women comprise nearly 40 percent of all interscholastic and intercollegiate sport participants.
Progress is also evidenced in other sporting realms not directly impacted by the Title IX mandate. Today, women are participating at the professional level in sports that seemed beyond reach 40 years ago-including professional football (the Independent Women's Football League). The growing popularity of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) and the Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) league is an important phenomenon in itself. Indeed, the visibility and excellence of female athletes and women's sport have helped create a broader cultural context in which female athleticism has become "normalized," and in many cases, celebrated.
Sport and female athleticism have become inextricably linked to the empowerment of girls and women-as in the "Girl Power" movement in the 1990s, which led to the proliferation of representations of strong, athletic women in popular culture. Yet, despite this progress, we are far from a world of gender equality in American sport. Compared to their male counterparts, major inequities and shortcomings remain for female athletes-especially in terms of media attention and opportunities to coach and lead in the world of sport. In this article, we examine some of the sociological research that documents and helps account for these shortcomings. This work speaks to the multifaceted nature of an institution as large as sport, the persistence of sexism and male dominance, and the challenges entailed in making social change.
Media Fans of women's sports today find more social media sites with a primary focus on female athletes; they might, for example, look to WomenTalkSports.com, an online blog network. More media outlets broadcast women's sport and in higher broadcast quality than in the past. Research has shown that the production values (such as the number of camera angles, use of slow motion replays, graphics, and quality of commentators) have also improved dramatically over the past 20 years. Still, there is a lack of coverage of women's sport in the mainstream media.
Although televised broadcast coverage of female sport Title IX of the Educational Amendments to the Constitution states that "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal assistance." In the nearly 40 years since it passed, this provision has played an important role, both directly and indirectly, in girls and women's sport participation in the United States.
Photo by Lori Fowlkes (lorielizabethphotography)
Contexts, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 42-46. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2012 American Sociological Association.
Participation has improved in both quality and quantity, these gains have not translated into increased coverage in newspapers, magazines, or televised news and highlight shows. For example, in 2003 ESPN began broadcasting the entire women's NCAA basketball tournament on its sister station, ESPN2. However, in a longitudinal study released in 2010 by the University of Southern California's Center for Feminist Research, sociologists Michael Messner and Cheryl Cooky found that ESPN-the dominant sports network in the United States-dedicated 100 segments and over 3 hours on the men's tournament, and only 11 segments and 6½ minutes on the women's; most of the women's tournament coverage was relegated to a small, scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen. Messner and Cooky also found that televised news media coverage of women's sport was at its lowest level in 20 years-it accounted for less than two percent of televised news coverage in 2009.
Perhaps even more problematic is that when female athletes do receive mainstream media attention, it is typically in sexualized ways that trivialize their athleticism. For example, one of the more disturbing trends that we have observed is the growing number of female athletes featured in "lad mags" like FHM, Maxim, and Playboy.
Audiences are more likely to see a female athlete in her swimsuit lounging on the beach than in her uniform on the field. Since the early 2000s, Sports Illustrated has featured female athletes in the annual "Swimsuit Issue"-its best-selling issue every year. The issue has boasted top female athletes such as Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova, Danica Patrick, and Amanda Beard (and far more often than they've appeared in any other issue of Sports Illustrated). Racecar driver Patrick and Olympic swimmer Beard have also been in FHM , posing in ways that resemble soft-core pornography.
And this past summer, the German U-20 women's soccer team showed up in the German edition of Playboy, just days before the 2011 Women's World Cup, to help "promote the sport." As sociologist Mary Jo Kane recently argued in a column for The Nation, such images "sell sex" but do little to legitimize and promote female athleticism. Stereotypical representations of this sort would not be so troubling if media images of female athletic competence were commonplace.
There are certainly far more female athletes, professional leagues, and female athlete superstars today than there were 20 or 30 years ago. So, why does the media continue to silence, ignore, trivialize, and hyper-sexualize female athletes?
Scholars argue that the ways in which male and female athletes are represented in the media maintain existing gendered hierarchies, uphold sport as a male preserve, and reaffirm the masculine norms and values that are dominant in the wider society. The ways female athletes shape their own images and representations are also part of the package, along with the choices of media producers, journalists, and audiences to produce and consume these images. All of these choices, of course, are made within a broader context-where ways of seeing privilege men and masculine ideals.
Some argue that in order to combat the trivialized and hyper-sexualized images of female athletes, we need more women in positions of power within media organizations who could challenge embedded sexism and masculine ideals. Yet women are consistently underrepresented in such positions of power in mainstream media organizations-and beyond. taking charge-or not Many of those who fought for Title IX assumed that a rise in female sports participation would automatically translate to increased leadership opportunities for women in sport.
This expectation has not been borne out. Despite the fact that female athletic participation is at a historic high at all levels of sport, women are a scarce minority in positions of power within sports organizations. For example, Acosta and Carpenter have shown that the percentage of women in coaching and administrative positions in women's sport has actually declined, from over 90 percent to roughly 40 percent, since Title IX passed- and this percentage is lower than at any time in history except in 2006. In fact, in the most visible and arguably most important positions in sport-head coaches, athletic administrators, Major inequities remain for female athletes- especially in terms of media attention, distribution of institutional resources, and opportunities to coach and lead in the world of sport.