Catch da Flava - Women in Sports

For this portion of Health Talks Radio, host Diamond talked about women in sports and asked our panel of all-women outnumbering the lone male questions about women in sports. Travis, our only male panelists, claims he was not at all intimidated and switched into accents to ease the tension. In discussing the barriers to making sports more accessible to girls and women, Diamond talked about the discrepancies in women and men and mentioned she learned that the WNBA has smaller basketballs for women in the league than that of the NBA. Playing devil’s advocate, Judy mentions that perhaps this would be justified since women tend to be generally biologically smaller but in the vein of equity, then the hoops should be lowered to accommodate biology as well, to which Diamond does not believe has been done, which highly suggests there is discrimination in making basketballs smaller for the WNBA.

When talking about how sports helps men and women get healthy, we wonder if promoting sports as a great way to get in more exercise and a healthier lifestyle, Judy is skeptical that it would be effective because of the social segregation in exercise already exhibited, as we observe in weight rooms where men tend to dominate the space and women tend toward aerobic exercise. In order to encourage sports, there needs to be a total social and cultural change in the perception of sports and gender identity.

We’d like to thank our panelists Beverly, Diamond, Erika, Judy, and Travis for being on air with us to talk about girls in sports.

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