Sport's woman problem: the FA's tweet is just the tip of the iceberg

Sport's woman problem: the FA's tweet is just the tip of the iceberg


‘Back to being mothers, partners and daughters’, read an FA tweet about the returning England women’s team this week. It’s time the sporting world stopped patronising women and started recognising them as equals

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The official FA Twitter account, which has almost 1.2 million followers, welcomed the England women’s football team home this week with the message:
Our #Lionesses go back to being mothers, partners and daughters today, but they have taken on another title – heroes”

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The trouble is, though, that the more you unpack it, the more you realise what an odd thing it was to tweet. Do we consider women’s roles as mothers, partners and daughters so incompatible with stellar international careers that those relationships are simply put on hold while they are working? Would we ever see a similar tweet welcoming home a triumphant male England team, with the focus immediately reverting to their domestic situations? Doesn’t this somewhat blur the fact that many of the players are in fact returning to extremely high-profile and skilled jobs for top teams in the UK?
ages

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It’s been 10 years since Fifa president Sep Blatter said: “Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball. They could, for example, have tighter shorts,” and our national team is still contending with puerile and insulting sexism. As the team prepared for the World Cup semi-finals last week, one national newspaper ran an article titled: “Watching the lionesses is such a roar deal.” It proclaimed: “The World Cup has shown that women’s football really isn’t that good – whoever could have predicted that? A woman’s place is not on a foreign field playing second-rate football – that’s Gareth Bale’s job. A woman’s place is in the wrong.”

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So determined are some to “protect” the male domain of sport from any female invasion that the battle even extends into video games. When EA Sport recently announced it was adding a few optional female teams to its Fifa 16 game, the internet erupted in male outrage and despair. Choice comments included “Absolutely ridiculous”; “Guessing if you play with a female team you won’t be able to park the bus”; “Isn’t female football a joke anyway?”; and my personal favourite: “It’s a man’s sport … women have ruined the earth and now they are ruining Fifa!”

Now that’s an overreaction.

http://www.theguardian.com/football/womens-blog/2015/jul/08/sports-woman-problem-the-fas-tweet-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg