Girl Sports: Playing with the Boys by Eileen McDonough and Laura Pappano

The subtitle and argument of McDonough and Pappano's book Playing With the Boys is Why Separate Is Not Equal in Sports. "Equality in sports," journalist Laura Pappano insists, "is essential to gaining equality in all walks of life--social, educational, political, and economic."

"Sports matters," the authors say. Sports are peculiarly "a place in America where power and money and male power very often meet." Not unexpectedly, women and girls are often barred by law or practice from equal participation in major national sports, including those where they are competitive. Strangely enough, this segregation by sex extends even to national competitions in chess and bridge, games in which women are physically able to move a pawn or shuffle a deck as effectively as men. Sports are, the authors assert, "the most sexually segregated social institution in American society," extending from peewee teams to professional leagues. In the rationale of our national sports, the authors contend, women are as a group considered inferior, and this rationale doesn't just reflect the projected inferiority, it actually constructs it. Unlikely to have the opportunity to learn, practice, and master skills under the most favorable conditions of coaching, facilities, peers, and community support, it is not surprising that few women manage to excell. Like the old Negro baseball leagues, girl sports are often set aside in a ghetto reserved for "girls' games."

Indeed, Pappano and McDonagh liken the history of women's sports to that of racial segregation. Originally, women were barred from organized sport as African Americans were barred from learning to read. With the passage of Title IX in 1974 women advanced from a situation in which most sports were not open to girls to a status in which institutions were required to make teams available in public schools and colleges, primarily on a gender-segregated basis only, separate but "equivalent." But for all the opportunity Title IX has offered, the authors insist that "separate is not equal in sports." The prohibition against gender mixing in sport labels women as inherently inferior, with lasting consequences for women's advancement in politics, education, and especially the workplace. The symbolism of this segregation is invisible, but powerful in American public life.

The authors do not contest the physical differences between the average size and strength of men and women, but point out that the bell-shaped curves for physical attributes for males and females overlap considerably, making some women bigger or faster than some men. For example, they observe that, although no woman has yet won the Boston Marathon, the top women finishers are better than most of the men who compete with them. They also suggest that most men could not compete with the 350-pound tackles and 7-foot centers in professional football and basketball either. Certainly our most popular national sports evolved to show off what males do best simply because males were dominant in the societies which designed and developed these sports. (No malice aforethought, just boys doing what comes naturally.) The authors point out that there are sports in which women are equal or superior because of their physical attributes--extreme marathons, cold water swimming, and the like. Just because few women can dunk a basketball like Michael Jordan doesn't mean that women who play Division I college basketball or soccer should be barred from their local athletic leagues or company teams for life.

Playing With the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports is bound to raise controversy from several elements in society: one group asserts that since most women can't make the upper level college and pro teams, they have no business playing with the boys at any level; a second group insists that the monetary market alone should decide which teams and players should compete; and another group, less well defined, reacts to the superior numbers of women in higher education by insisting that males need special nurturing, through segregated sports and special educational opportunities, to hold their own in American society. These arguments seem flawed and detrimental to the best interest of both boys and girls. McDonagh and Pappano do not advocate that voluntary gender segregation be forbidden, but simply assert that women should be allowed equal opportunity to practice and try out for sports on all levels, without having to take the matter to court, and let the chips fall where they may. Their premise is that the image of women competing in popular sports is a powerful one for young women, one which means that they are accepted as full participants--real people--in the social, academic, political, and economic world of our time.

Eileen McDonagh is professor of political science at Northeastern University, visiting scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, and author of Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent.

Laura Pappano, author of The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel So Alone, is writer-in-residence at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College and has written for The New York Times, Boston Globe, and The Washington Post.