Dear Future President,

“My coach said I run like a girl, and I said if he ran a little faster he could too.” (Mia Hamm). Many women today face the problem of not being treated with respect because they are girls playing sports. Almost everyday somebody has told me “you’re just a girl” like it’s a bad thing to be a girl. Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean that I can’t do things a boy can do. It’s not just that girls are told sexist remarks about playing sports, but the fact that the professional women sport teams and players are still overlooked. A wnba player makes around $100,000 a year, while a nba player makes millions.

It’s not just the money part but barely any women sports get any attention. If the amount of attention to women sports keep up, then the wnba might shut down. This could be said the same for the women's’ soccer team or any sports. This issue just doesn’t effect the women who play on these teams, but some of their fans out there who enjoy watching them play. The U.S. men's soccer team players make around $6 million, while the maximum salary for a women on the national soccer team is $126,000. The men's national soccer team has only won one more world cup than the women's, so they should be getting a pretty equal pay. While their pay is around $5 million apart. Even when i was typing in “how many world cups has the american team won,” they assumed i meant the men's team. To make it seem that only people are interested in the men’s sports. One day, when I was playing two v. two (girls versus boys) one of the boys told my friend and I, “It’s not just a fact that boys are better than girls, it’s genetics.” Even though this has been proven incorrect, some men still believe they will always be better than women.

One way to solve this problem is the advertisement of sports. Commercials for sports rarely have women in them, it seems they only showcase men and their athleticism. In the mens sport commercial it shows them playing or working hard, while in women sport commercials 90% of the time it shows women as being pretty and not working hard or displaying their athleticism. Not all women athletes are wanting to be depicted as only being pretty and not working/playing hard. The people that set up these advertisements need to realize how hard these women work and that they aren’t just a pretty face. They need to step into the shoes of a woman athlete to see how hard they train and work for their goals. Even the big sport broadcasters like ESPN don’t even pay attention to the goals that women athletes accomplish.

Many women these days face the problem of not being treated the same because they’re girls playing sports. Whether it’s the payment, the attention they get, or the fact they are depicted as just a pretty face. Women and girls any age work just as hard as men and boys, they train just as hard, work just as hard, and play just as hard. I believe this problem could be fixed by advertising them more. Or putting women in more sport related commercials and paying more attention to their achievements, for example when the women’s national soccer team won the world cup. They didn’t nearly get enough recognition as they should’ve.

Sincerely,

Natalie Getz