Still a long way to go in equal treatment of men and women athletes

Tennis star Serena Williams being stripped of a point, then penalized a game, then fined $17,000 at the US Open was the “grossest example of sports sexism yet,” said two CBS.com journalists — both women.

A male writer for the Telegraph in London called on Williams to apologize for her outbursts during the September match, saying, “This is about personalities, not about gender.” 

Purdue sports sociologist Cheryl Cooky, an associate professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, gives a wider view: the punishment for berating the umpire — before losing the match to Naomi Osaka of Japan — was another example of sexism not just in sports but in American culture.

“As a sociologist who studies sports, I’m more interested in how that incident gets taken up in the culture and what that might tell us about these larger issues,” says Cooky, a former president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. “Would her behavior have been depicted in the same way if it had been displayed by a male athlete? Indeed, there were a number of different men’s professional tennis players who came out in defense of Serena. The same behavior that’s described as intense, competitive passion when coming from a man is viewed as gender transgressive and inappropriate and uncalled for when coming from a woman — in particular, a black woman. To me, that’s what speaks to the racism and sexism in that particular incident.”

Umpire Carlos Ramos gave Williams a code violation for receiving coaching during the match; a penalty point in one game for destroying her racket; and the loss of a game for calling Ramos a thief. 

The Women’s Tennis Association responded in a statement, “The WTA believes that there should be no difference in the standards of tolerance provided to the emotions expressed by men versus women. We do not believe that this was done last night.”

Cooky, a self-described feminist sports sociologist whose research has focused on television coverage of sports, says the amount of coverage given to the Williams incident in contrast to coverage of women’s sporting events reflects the sexism in sports.

“It is the controversy — the scandals in women’s sports — that generate the coverage,” Cooky says. “In absence of this incident, it would have been like, ‘Oh, OK, Serena wins another title.’ That’s the other unfortunate aspect of all of this — that we miss out on these opportunities just to appreciate and celebrate the accomplishments of athletes.”

Scandals in men’s sports get attention, she says; it’s just a matter of balance.

“Clearly, scandal and controversy generate coverage in men’s sports, but it’s part of a larger landscape,” says Cooky, whose research includes “‘It’s Dude Time!’ A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports in Televised News and Highlight Shows,” published in 2015 in the journal Communication & Sport. “When so much of the focus is on the controversy in women’s sports, that makes the difference even more glaring.”

Cooky says sexism in sports is shown in various ways: The increase in participation rate of girls in sports lags behind that of boys. Girls and women get less funding for team sports and less money for scholarships. And the wage gap prompted the US women’s soccer and hockey teams to mount legal battles to win agreements for better pay.

“We’re so much more progressive and inclusive as a society,” Cooky says. “There’s a lot of things that we can point to where, yes, that might be the case. But there’s so many more that we can point to where it’s like, ‘Wow, this is really not that much different than 30 years ago when I was a teenager.’”

As for the future? “I want to be hopeful, but there’s kind of the realist in me,” she adds. “I’ve been doing this for the past 25 years now. And there are some nuances in some of those changes, but the overall trends are still suggesting that there’s much more work to be done.”

More change needs to come from the top, Cooky contends. 

“A huge catalyst for change is the people who are in leadership positions, who are in positions of power, who are deciding what stories get covered and when, who’s deciding who gets resources and how much, and who’s deciding who gets access to the program and under what circumstances,” she says. “Change is going to happen when people who are invested in equitable treatment of girls and women in sports are put into positions to make decisions to make that kind of change happen.

“We need to change the linkage between sport and masculinity,” Cooky says. “And we need, as a culture and as a society, to understand that sport isn’t just for, by, and about men, but that sport is something that should be for, by, and about all of us — men and women, girls and boys.”