Gender and School Sports

In reference to gender and school sports, there is some rather substantial (and largely unsurprising) evidence to suggest that girls and boys were not treated equally. The fact that girls and boys were not allowed to play the same sports i.e. football and rugby for boys, hockey and netball for girls, meant that girls did not enjoy the same sporting luxuries that the boys did.

On top of this, the fact that one publication of the Holly Leaf magazine found that, during the First World War and with the risk of air-raids looming over Britain every day, “The School has not been able to play any Hockey or Netball matches”, yet, due to the “present situation [otherwise known as the threat of air-raids and bad weather]… only four matches” had been played by the boys’ football team. If that does not scream inequality and unfairness, I don’t know what does!

In almost all of the magazines we found, we found that girls and boys were taught physical education (P.E.) separately. This is not a huge problem, as this is the way schooling is today, but when it emerges that the girls receive a sub-standard education (because they are excluded from certain sports) and the fact that, in these magazines, the girls section would span about half a page, whereas the boys sports section would span eight, nine, or sometimes more pages, and it really begs the question, where is the equality here? That is the mission of our research, and this is one of many questions that we hope to answer during the course of our research project.