Sunday Pick: The Past and Future of Gender in Sport | Good Sport

0:06Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hu. Today we have an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective handpicked by us for you. Topics like Title IX and equal pay for women athletes are in the news a lot these days. But did you know that athletics weren't always categorized by gender? To understand what's gotten us to this point and how to move forward, we're bringing you this fantastic episode of Good Sport. Host Jodi Avergan speaks with trans and cis athletes and journalists to dig into the history of gender divisions in sports and what might be possible if we stopped using gender as the primary way to categorize athletes altogether.

0:46If you want more sports content from TED or just want to see the world through a new lens, check out Good Sport wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.

1:02Did you know that it's been 50 years since Title IX passed in the United States? or that in 2022, the U.S. Soccer Federation announced that players on the men's and women's teams would get equal pay for the first time in history. What about this one? This year, 2023, for the first time ever, the Women's March Madness title game will air on network TV with a big pregame show and everything, just like the men. Thinking about those milestones, my reaction is, Gosh, it's about freaking time. And yes, they represent genuine progress that we should celebrate. We are expanding our notions of who gets to play sports and what kind of resources they get to do it.

1:43But of course, these milestones didn't happen without a fight. Many, many fights. And looking around, it's not hard to see that there are still a lot of fights happening about gender in sports. I mean, just look at the debate around trans athletes. The latest chapter in the long fight around who gets to participate. I look at that debate and if I'm being honest, I feel a little overwhelmed, but I also keep coming back to a core idea. We can and we should find more ways for more people to participate in sports. Not just because I think everybody should get to participate, but also because doing so means we get to know amazing new athletes.

2:22We get new styles of play and new records and new opportunities to push the envelope about what our bodies can do, which is what sports is all about, right? And as I started talking to people who think a lot about gender and sports, I heard something that really put this question into a new light for me. It came from Laura Papano, a journalist who co-authored a book called Playing with the Boys, Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports. Transgender athletes have created so much of a challenge for a system that is set up as the most sex segregated social system we have in the country. I mean, it's more sex segregated than the military.

3:05Basically, what Laura is saying is that there are all these specific questions, including the one about trans participation. But behind all of them is the same root issue, gender segregation. So when I look at the controversy over transgender athletes, I don't look at it as the transgender athletes being the problem. I look at it as the problem of having set up sports because we decide how it works, right? We decide what the rules are. We decide who plays. We decide how it's scored. We decide, you know, all those pieces.

3:41The debate about trans athletes stems from the same origin as all the other conversations about gender and sports. At some point in the past, we decided that they should be gender segregated. But why? And as the rest of the world is thinking more expansively about gender, and I really do think it is, why is sports lagging behind? And what would happen if we did start to move away from gender as some fundamental, immutable divide in sports? Well, I think there are some really cool possibilities.

4:16My name is Jody Avergan, and this is Good Sport from the TED Audio Collective. Today's episode, a history of gender segregation in sports and a humble proposal for how we might start moving past it. Here we go.

4:56If we're talking about dividing sports by gender, Maybe let's start with some possible alternatives. Because it does seem to me that there are all sorts of ways that you can categorize athletes to make sure that play is safe, fair, and competitive.

5:14Take wrestling, for example. I have a buddy who wrestled competitively who pointed out to me that in that sport, one way you go about categorizing people is by weight class. Maybe that's a way we could go about it. Or think about the Paralympics, where they get really specific about different people's functional abilities. Paralympic skiing, for example, has a standing division, a sitting division, and a visually impaired division. Smarter people than me could probably suggest a bunch more ways to do it. But the point is, we don't have to segregate sports by gender. And to put a finer point on it, maybe we shouldn't.

5:48Because as our society's understanding of gender has gotten more expansive, and generally, I do think it has, sports has largely lagged behind.

6:01So we've created a very gender divided institution, which just doesn't serve the reality of our population. It doesn't serve the broader purpose of athletics, in my opinion. Yeah. No, I mean, I think we're sort of like generally as a society in agreement that we have to address these things head on in almost every sphere. And then we walk right up to sports and people freak out. Well, I mean, it's sports are physical and men are supposed to be physically supreme. And this messes with that. I mean, it's there are so many assumptions that have gone into the structure of the way sport works. And we the idea that we need to revisit those assumptions is scary.

6:53One of the reasons that people find it scary to confront this stuff is because sports doesn't just reflect a strict gender binary, but also a gender hierarchy, men above women. Just look around and you'll see it. More pay, more prestige, more attention to men's sports than women's. If we have set up sport to be deeply sex segregated and segregated in such a way that it really is a celebration of men's, you know, gender hierarchy, that's a problem. And it is a problem that we still have. And Laura says this has a long history. Modern sports were created, you know, for socializing reasons. So let's go all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, the time when modern sports were invented.

7:46Bit of a history lesson here. Buckle up. The Industrial Revolution upended society. Manual labor turned into factory work. People moved to big cities. Huge changes, disruption, a feeling of instability. There was a lot of, you know, confusion about how people should be. The changes that were happening, the urbanization, there were concerns that because we had vehicles that people would lose use of their legs. I mean, it sounds funny now, but there was a lot of anxiety. This is the moment when modern organized sports were born, in part as a way to reintroduce physicality as people moved away from manual labor and provide some order in this brave new world, some continuity with the old ways.

8:33So one of the ways of combating that was to really enforce this idea of separate spheres for men and women. The women's sphere was the home, the moral upbringing of children, all of those things. The men's was the public sphere. And there was a lot of attention to keeping those spheres separate. That separation has been around for a long time, of course, and modern sports doubled down on it. sports emerged as an arena for men. Women were not to participate. Or if they did, not in any real competitive way. You can look at it in the dress, right? Women's early tennis dress were these long, onerous kinds of outfits that I don't know how one actually could move in them.

9:20And maybe that was the point. When women did participate in sports, it didn't challenge those gender roles. It often reinforced them. Like when women started playing competitive basketball, in the early 1900s. There was a lot of concern that they were looking too masculine and there would be these kind of beauty pageants in the middle of the game. So you had the queen of the court who was chosen as a way of offsetting the fact that they were playing ferociously when it wasn't halftime. Take a second to imagine that if you can. You're playing basketball, sprinting, sweating, and at halftime, you have to run off the court, not for a stretch or some water, but to put on some other outfit, probably change your hairdo, and then come back on the court to parade around in a beauty pageant.

10:08And then is to go back to the locker room, change, and finish the game. Absurd, right? But Laura says it all reflects gender norms that are still going strong today. Number one. Inferiority. The fundamental belief that women are physically inferior. Second is injury. The worry, the paternalistic need, desire to protect women from getting injured. And third is immorality. It was just wrong. And these things have had a tremendous impact on the way sports are set up and organized. These days, we're not forcing WNBA players to slip into heels during halftime. But Laura says there are still a lot of rules that keep women's sports subordinate to men's.

10:53Like, why in the world do women's tennis players only play three sets instead of the five that men do? Or why is men's lacrosse full contact and the women's version of the game is not? Though anyone who's watched or played knows how physical it can really get. And now they're not wearing helmets. There's a ton of these examples. I mean, there's been a long history of creating kind of these rules where the result is that the men are doing just a little bit more. or a little bit longer. And that's not about women's inability to do the same distance. It's about men being, you know, the real version and the women's version being the second-class version.

11:35In other words, we've designed sports to make it look like men are just more sporty. And we've gone a step further. We've even changed the design of sports when that image is threatened. I interviewed someone who won in rivalry in the Olympics, and she was given the silver medal. She explained to me how she had actually won the gold medal, but was given the silver medal, and they were separated. Laura's talking about Margaret Murdoch, who competed in the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Back then, men and women competed together in this event, and Margaret Murdoch tied a man for first place. But because misogyny is real, the judges decided to break the tie by awarding her the silver medal.

12:18And by the 1984 Olympics, you guessed it, there was a new rule. Men and women would compete separately in that event. That tells you everything you need to know about what's really going on here. So the history of and practice of organized competitive sport is so riddled with purposeful biases that go beyond physical differences. Yes, there are physical differences. But you know what? But there are some guys that I'm better at tennis then, right? I believe it. Me.

13:02Over time, over decades and decades, these rules, which we invented, become something like fact. Clearly, men are more athletic than women. Why else would there be these rules? So we need to keep these rules to make up for the difference between men and women. and round and round we go. In light of that, when I hear things like women are fundamentally inferior athletes or women don't want to be as physical or they'll get injured. When I hear those stories about a high school boys team beating a pro women's team in basketball or soccer, I wonder how much of that is something that's inherent about gender and how much of that is a product of women being told they aren't fast, they aren't physical, that they're gonna get injured.

13:44Laura Papano has a story about this, about how those larger forces come crashing down to the individual level. It's from her time growing up as a young girl who played baseball with the boys. I remember one game where I stole a base. I moved on the motion of the pitcher, which in that league was what the rule was. I stole the base and everyone was appalled. And my team, the other team, they just didn't think that a girl should be able to steal a base. And I just remember standing on second base and people saying, go back, go back. And I just remember crossing my arms and just sitting there listening.

14:23This is a children's baseball game. The stakes could not be lower. I mean, the whole point should be to get out there, move around, have fun. But instead, it became about trying to put Laura in her place. You know, maybe I wasn't the best player, but I wasn't the worst player on the team either. And I wanted to participate. And I think that that's what we go back to, whether we're talking about transgender athletes or we're talking about, you know, kindergartners or we're talking about recreational players. People want to participate. Yeah. They want to compete. But after being told over and over that a certain space isn't for them, what do you think is going to happen?

15:02I think one of the biggest problems in the history of women and women's leadership and women's athletics and women in general is self-censorship. Is that it is very easy to get to a point where you don't need to be told that you can't. You decide ahead of time that you can't, that you're not able to do this.

15:31See, there are other places in society where we've kind of established that when people are told that they are inherently not good at something their performance gets weaker as a result There's even a name for this the Pygmalion effect In Laura's baseball experience she was able to push through those messages that she couldn't or shouldn't play hard But I can imagine there's a lot of people who probably had a similar experience and didn't so hopefully you're with me on this basic idea that in sports we see larger gender problems reflected and reinforced and hopefully you'll see that maybe there's a path forward for one if we understand that we made sports this way then we can also see that we can remake them too we can change them so that they line up with our values and our goals so that they do reflect the reality of our population.

16:22So the essence of sport is really good competition. And at a moment when the rest of society is challenging that and breaking it apart, it's time to do that in sports. Absolutely. The question is, how?

16:56So, all right, there is a fair argument in some cases for continuing to segregate some sports by gender, at least right now. As Laura pointed out, it can lead to meaningful differences between men and women when it comes to athletic performance, especially at the elite level. But hopefully over the course of this episode, we've started to make a case that there's some version of sports where this isn't the only meaningful difference. that maybe there's a world where gender doesn't have to serve the role it's played, dividing athletes along lines that have all sorts of pitfalls. Maybe there are alternatives.

17:29So what would that world even look like? Admittedly, this is a very big question. And like we mentioned at the start of the episode, there are a number of directions you could go. Weight classes in wrestling, the Paralympic model, that new idea that someone smarter than me will come up with. But what I want to focus on for the rest of this episode is something I know really well. Because there are some sports where people of different genders already do play on the same teams, on the same field, at the very highest level. And luckily for me, and maybe for you, my sport, ultimate frisbee, is one of them.

18:07There are men's and women's divisions in the sport, but mixed ultimate is thriving as well. If you don't take it from me, take it from the International Olympic Committee. The IOC has made it clear that the version of ultimate that they're interested in that could become an Olympic sport someday is the mixed gender version, where teams consist of seven players, at least three of whom are men and three women. I think it's just like really unique. Not many other sports out there at that level that are mixed. That's Raha Mozaffari, one of the top ultimate players in the game right now. She's one of those players who can do it all.

18:45She's comfortable gaining receiving yards with big cuts downfield. She can finesse throws, control possession. Yeah, she can kind of do it all. I pride myself in my versatility. That's always been my strong suit. And as a defender, I think those types of players are one of the hardest players to defend. She's right. They are, which is why I mostly played offense. Raha plays for one of the best teams in Mixed Ultimate, and she loves it. Discs are coming in faster, slower, hanging more. Separation is different based on individual matchups. There's people poaching off onto different genders, different speed, different size again.

19:30In my career, I generally played Men's Ultimate. But I did play a few years of Mixed, and I loved it. My team even made the semifinals of the national championships. Thank you very much. To me, Mixed Ultimate felt like a new version of a sport I loved that I thought about a lot and tried to get really good at. And when I first joined a mixed team, it was like, oh, cool. Here's this new puzzle to figure out as a player and a team. It's the same size field and the same rules of play. But now there's this new dynamic. We'd have strategy meetings and work in practice to figure out how do we take advantage of the unique way this version of the game is structured?

20:07Because it's not enough to just mix it up and hope it goes right. You have to be intentional about what you're trying to achieve, how it might be different in a way that's better. Otherwise, you might make the same mistake that Ultimate made. See, back in the early days of Mixed, women were seen almost as a handicap. Like, the true version of the sport is played by men, and now there's women on the field getting in the way. And the response for many was to ignore them. Just focus on the men. I remember the style being more geared towards, okay, so here are best players, best athletes, and we're going to try to figure out how to isolate them on the field.

20:49I noticed this myself when I played. It was hard not to. On some teams, the men wouldn't pass to the women at all. They'd just be looked off. And that gets really frustrating if that happens over and over again. And you give up and you're like, hey, I don't know what else I'm supposed to do. I'm doing everything I can. I'm open, but I'm still getting looked off. That's a crappy way to treat women on the field. And it sucks to watch. But Raha's main point is that from a strategy perspective, it's a terrible approach. If you're a smart defender and you see like, OK, your person is just not involved, you're going to leave them and go impact the field somewhere else.

21:27So that's, as an offensive team, that's a terrible strategy because then you have like extra defenders just guarding where the active part of the play is because they're not engaging all their players. So just basic Frisbee, really. But that's the way it was when things were getting off the ground. All those old hangups about men and women, about categories and gender, they were still very much in play. Take this example from earlier in Raha's career, when she had a run-in on the field with a guy who desperately needed to listen to this episode. I was just making like a normal in-cut, and all of a sudden I feel like this massive just impact from the side, like a tackle, just took me out as I was catching the disc.

22:13By the way, ultimate is technically a non-contact sport, similar to soccer. Sure, there's occasional body contact, but there shouldn't be stuff like what Raha is describing. So she was thrown by the contact. But more than anything, in this moment, she saw a deeper dynamic going on. The guy just didn't think that a woman would be playing as aggressively as Raha was. I was so mad. But, you know, I just kind of like stared him down and was like, what the heck was that? And he's like, oh, I didn't realize that you were going to be fast enough to get there. There's that inferiority bias, right? That just made me more upset.

22:48It was like, are you kidding me? Like, do you know who I am? Like, I'm going to catch the disc. If the disc is in front of me, I'm going to go for it with all I can. So that really just rubbed me the wrong way. So, yeah, in Mixed, we still have this larger gender problem affecting how individual moments play out. But here's the part where an incident like this can actually move things forward. Because over time, the community has started to recognize that this is a problem and has started to check itself. People see these things, right? They don't go unsaid or unseen. So people make comments on Twitter and socials and like, as they should.

23:27and say like, this is not okay. So that actually made that person be intentional about improving and working on that. And I really do think that they did. So that's a good way to learn, right? Over time, that has had a noticeable impact on the way that Mixed is played. It's shifted everything from strategy to sportsmanship. And now, as I see it, the division is flourishing. You really saw this clearly at the World Games in 2022, where Mixed Ultimate was the only version of Ultimate on display. To many, it was the best showcase the sport has ever had. It was really awesome seeing Mosquera pulling a full field at the back of the end zone and seeing the other team have to work all the way up.

24:12Okay, folks, we're a little in the weeds with Ultimate lingo here. Did you ever think this would be happening to you? But the pull, it's like the kickoff. It's very important. You try and pin your opponent deep on their side of the field. It was really cool seeing Sarah Mextrop just skying a bunch of guys taller than her. Skying, jumping in the air, catching the disc over your opponent. Sarah did a lot of that. And so many other creative throwers like Finny and Carolyn and Trope just making these incredible catches that she shouldn't. All those players that Raha just name-checked, they were the women on the top teams.

24:49And as I watched them push their teams to victory, it really hit me what a long way Mixed Ultimate has come in just a couple decades. So it was just the all around like amazing display of athleticism in a unique style with men and women on the same field together and working together. What I hear Raha saying is we have to learn to play with others, no matter who they are. It's a lesson I've learned over and over in sports. I've been a jerk and I've been a good teammate. The latter feels way better on the field and off. And it's not just about feeling good. Rethinking gender lines can have a real impact on and off the field.

25:29If you're trying to be a successful team in the truest sense, I think that means working hard to be more inclusive and welcoming to everyone. The more people feel welcome, important, seen, the better they'll perform, the better the team will perform. The best mixed teams, the ones that feel like they give us a glimpse of where sports could be headed, are the ones that include everyone. I think that message is pretty clear at this point. Overall, I think it's been great. I think it's brought the community together. Like you said, it's just become a lot more cohesive. Like we're all trying to be more inclusive and listen to each other.

26:10And yeah, it has been good.

26:15sports mirroring a better path maybe even modeling it of course it's not simple progress could be slow mixed ultimate is still working through those entrenched gender dynamics but if sports has been a way of reinforcing gender segregation for what generations these latest debates have been happening for like a blink of an eye what we're seeing is the first few steps in a new direction. And so what I want to leave you with is this. If we let go of how unthinkable it would feel to get rid of gender segregation in sports and just sit with that idea for a bit, maybe what we'll find is not some tidy little solution that immediately sets everything right, but instead an opportunity, the space to try things and fail and maybe eventually land on something that works.

27:08Better than just works. We can find something new and inspiring and plain old fun. We gotta do this more often.

27:24Next time on Good Sport, what happens when suddenly you can't play your sport anymore? Really, it was like, oh my gosh, I'm in survival mode. What can I do? You know, because I suffered the death of my athletic career. Retiring, aging, and finding your next thing. Good Sport is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective. It's hosted by me, Jody Avergan. The show is produced by TED. This episode was written and produced by Isabel Carter. Our team includes Camille Peterson, Ponce Rutch, Sarah Nix, Jimmy Gutierrez, Michelle Quint, Ban Ban Chang, and Roxanne High Lash. Jake Gorski is our sound designer and mix engineer.

28:08Fact-checking by Hana Matsudaira. Special thanks this episode to Charlie Eisenhood and Dr. Cherie Becker. We want to hear from you. Questions, ideas, reactions. Our email is goodsport at ted.com. Or you can find me on social media and yell at me there. One last thing, if you're game. If you like this episode, hit play in your podcast player and text it to a friend. Even better, text it to a friend who might not think that they're into sports. Who knows? They might be into this show. Thanks again for listening to Good Sport. My name is Jody Avergan. See you soon.