Living in Shanghai and attending a Chinese university has inundated this semester with cross-cultural comparisons. In terms of sports, some of these differences I could have expected and really haven’t been all too shocking, such as the near non-existence of baseball and the obsession with the Black Mamba. I would say that the most striking disparity while observing sports at my university though, is the near-absence of women in school athletics.
After two years of attending Georgetown and covering nearly every sports team we have, I started taking some things for granted, thinking that the athletics we enjoy is relatively standard, with 23 varsity athletic teams on top of various club and intramural sports teams. That 12 of our varsity athletic teams are female and that women enjoy ample opportunities to join club and intramural teams never crossed my mind as unordinary. My two months in an unfamiliar sports environment gave me a fresh perspective.
Although basketball and soccer games are constantly going on outside on courts and fields across campus, regardless of time of day or day of week, you will never see a female student participating in one of those games. After two months of daily observation, not once have I seen even one female student playing in a game, let alone a game comprised solely of female athletes. As for intercollegiate women’s sports teams, you can forget about it.
Bothered by this lack of understanding, I set out to figure out why the athletic opportunities for female students are so drastically scarce. I eventually wound up with two different explanations: the sociological analysis and the general student opinion. My sociology professor, who specializes in gender studies in modern Chinese society, agreed with the notion that societal pressures on women to avoid such types of physical activity cause female students to be averse to sports. In the United States, we can count on sports as an essential weapon in fighting against socially constructed gender roles. Girls can take the field just as guys do and battle for a win because expending physical effort and getting dirty does not define a gender.
The sports world in China, though, is dominated by men. Although, women have been progressively becoming more equal in spheres such as the workforce and family life, equality in sports severely lags behind. From a very early age, girls are primed with expectations to ignore athletics. Thus, these gender-based social pressures provide an end result of deficient interest. Compare that to the United States, where it is relatively common to find women’s sports on national television.
Recent efforts to help female students get more involved in athletics have surfaced, but most of the time these efforts only paint the same disappointing picture I see day after day. All female undergraduates at East China Normal University are forced to participate in a physical education class of sorts, which includes running, stretching, and sit-ups. But let me place a heavy emphasis on the word “forced” because when speaking with one Chinese classmate, she made it clear that these activities are a requirement of every female undergraduate, not an elective. The intentions of this program are, of course, positive, but the reality points out how serious this problem actually is, where undergraduate women would have almost no exposure to physical activity if not forced by an administrative order.
The brightest sign of hope for young women in sports comes in the form of a co-ed baseball club with about 25 members that meets once a week. Surprisingly, mostly women turn out. Yet even this seemingly unlikely baseball program is only a small step in the right direction. It is refreshing to see this group out there every Wednesday afternoon.
Struggling against a long established social construct is no simple task, though one that American sports has proven to be surmountable. Hopefully it’s only a matter of time before China makes the jump.
