The Past and Future of Gender in Sport (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Jody Avirgan:
Did you know it’s been 50 years since Title IX passed in the United States? Or that in 2022, the US 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 freakin’ 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.

But of course, these milestones didn’t happen without a fight. 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, and how. 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 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. We get new styles of play and new records and new opportunities to push the envelope of 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 in a new light for me. It came from Laura Pappano, a journalist who co-authored a book called Playing With The Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal In Sports.

[00:01:50] Laura Pappano:
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.

[00:02:05] Jody Avirgan:
Basically, 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.

[00:02:17] Laura Pappano:
So when I look at the controversy of 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.

[00:02:41] Jody Avirgan:
The debate about trans athletes stems from the same origin as all the other conversations about gender and sports: at some point, way in the past, we decided that they should be gender segregated. But why? And 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.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:03:16] Jody Avirgan:
My name is Jody Avirgan, 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.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:03:58] Jody Avirgan:
If we’re talking about diving sports by gender, maybe let’s start with some possible alternatives. Because it seems to me like there are all sorts of ways you could categorize athletes to make sure that play is safe, fair, and competitive.

Take 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.

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

[00:05:03] Laura Pappano:
So, 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.

[00:05:19] Jody Avirgan:
Yeah. No, I mean I’m, 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.

[00:05:32] Laura Pappano:
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, 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.

[00:05:55] Jody Avirgan:
One 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 womens.

[00:06:12] Laura Pappano:
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.

[00:06:31] Jody Avirgan:
And Laura says this has a long history.

[00:06:36] Laura Pappano:
Modern sports were created, you know, for socializing reasons.

[00:06:42] Jody Avirgan:
So, let’s go all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, the time when modern sports were invented. Bit 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.

[00:07:00] Laura Pappano:
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, you know, use of their legs. I mean, it sounds funny now, but it’s… There was a lot of anxiety.

[00:07:21] Jody Avirgan:
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.

[00:07:34] Laura Pappano:
So, 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.

[00:07:57] Jody Avirgan:
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.

[00:08:10] Laura Pappano:
You can look at it in the dress, right? Uh, women’s early tennis dress were these long onerous kinds of outfits that I, I don't know how one actually could move in them. And maybe that was the point.

[00:08:23] Jody Avirgan:
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…

[00:08:34] Laura Pappano:
There was a lot of concern that they were looking too masculine, and there would be, uh, 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.

[00:08:52] Jody Avirgan:
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 come back onto the court to parade around in a beauty pageant. And then you have 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:

[00:09:20] Laura Pappano:
Inferiority, the fundamental belief that women are physically inferior. Second is injury. The worry—that 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.

[00:09:45] Jody Avirgan:
These days we’re not forcing WNBA players to slip into heels during halftime… but Laura says there are still lots of rules that keep women’s sports subordinate to men’s. Like, 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 get—and now they’re not wearing helmets. There’s a ton of these examples.

[00:10:12] Laura Pappano:
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.

[00:10:36] Jody Avirgan:
In 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.

[00:10:50] Laura Pappano:
I interviewed someone who won, um, in riflery 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.

[00:11:01] Jody Avirgan:
Laura’s talking about Margaret Murdock, who competed in the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Back then, men and women competed together in this event. And Margaret Murdock tied a man for first place. But, because misogyny is real, the judges decided to break the tie by awarding her the silver medal. And by the 1984 Olympics—you guessed it—there was a new rule: men and women would compete separately in that event.

[00:11:28] Laura Pappano:
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, you know, there, there are some guys that I'm, I'm better at tennis than, right?

[00:11:51] Jody Avirgan:
I believe it. Um, me!

[BREAK]

[00:12:03] Jody Avirgan:
Over 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 the 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 boy’s team beating a pro women’s team in basketball or soccer, I wonder how much of that is something 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.

Laura Pappano has a story about this, about how those larger forces come down to the individual level. It’s from her time growing up as a young girl who played baseball with the boys.

[00:12:57] Laura Pappano:
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 they, 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.

[00:13:25] Jody Avirgan:
This 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.

[00:13:37] Laura Pappano:
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 wanna participate.

[00:13:54] Jody Avirgan:
Yeah.

[00:13:54] Laura Pappano:
They wanna compete.

[00:13:58] Jody Avirgan:
But after being told, over and over, that a certain space isn’t for them, what do you think’s gonna happen?

[00:14:04] Laura Pappano:
I think one of the biggest problems, um, in the history of women and women's leadership and women's athletics and women in general is self-censorship. Is that it? It is very easy to um, 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.

[00:14:32] Jody Avirgan:
See, 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 also see that we can re-make 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.

[00:15:23] Laura Pappano:
So, 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.

[00:15:35] Jody Avirgan:
Absolutely. The question is: how?

[BREAK]

[00:15:58] Jody Avirgan:
So, alright, there is a fair argument for continuing to segregate SOME sports by gender. At least for 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 a 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. So, what would that world even look like?

Admittedly, a very big question. And like we mentioned at the start of this 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.

There are men’s and women’s divisions in the sport, but mixed Ultimate is thriving as well. If you don’t want to 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.

[00:17:34] Raha Mozaffari:
I think it's just, like, really unique. Not many other sports out there at that level are mixed.

[00:17:41] Jody Avirgan:
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, she’s comfortable gaining receiving yards with big cuts down the field. She can finesse throws, control possession. Yeah, she can do it all.

[00:17:56] Raha Mozaffari:
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.

[00:18:09] Jody Avirgan:
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.

[00:18:17] Raha Mozaffari:
Discs are coming in faster, slower, hanging more. Separation is different based on individual matchups. There's people, like, poaching off onto different genders, different speed, different size again.

[00:18:33] Jody Avirgan:
In 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’d thought about a lot and tried to get really good at. And when I first joined a mixed team, it was like “Oh, cool, a 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.

Because 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 those 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.

[00:19:41] Raha Mozaffari:
I remember the style being more geared towards, “Okay, so here are our best players, best athletes, and we're gonna try to figure out how to isolate them on the field.”

[00:19:52] Jody Avirgan:
I 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.

[00:19:59] Raha Mozaffari:
And that gets really frustrating if that happens over and over again. 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.”

[00:20:10] Jody Avirgan:
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.

[00:20:20] Raha Mozaffari:
If you're a smart defender and you see like, okay, your person is just not involved. You’re gonna leave them and go impact the field somewhere else. So that's, as an offensive team, that’s 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.

[00:20:44] Jody Avirgan:
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 run-in on the field with a guy who desperately needed to listen to this episode.

[00:21:02] Raha Mozaffari:
I was just making, like, a normal in-cut, and all of a sudden I feel. This massive, just, impact from the side, like, like a tackle. Just took me out as I was catching the disc.

[00:21:15] Jody Avirgan:
By 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’s describing. So, Raha was thrown by the contact, but more than anything, in this moment she saw a deeper dynamic going on. The guy didn’t think a woman would be playing as aggressively as Raha was.

[00:21:36] Raha Mozaffari:
I was so mad. But, you know, I just kinda like stared him down and was like, “What the heck was that?” And he's like, “Oh, I didn't realize that you were gonna be fast enough to get there.”

[00:21:46] Jody Avirgan:
There’s that inferiority bias, right?

[00:21:48: Raha Mozaffari:
That just made me more upset. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” Like, do you know who I am? Like, I'm gonna catch the disc. If the disc is in front of me, I'm gonna go for it with all I can. So, that really just rubbed me the wrong way.

[00:22:02] Jody Avirgan:
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.

[00:22:20] Raha Mozaffari:
People see these things, right?

[00:22:22] Jody Avirgan:
Yeah.

[00:22:22] Raha Mozaffari:
They don't go unsaid or unseen. So people make comments on Twitter and socials and like, as they should, and say like, “This is not okay.” Um, 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?

[00:22:42] Jody Avirgan:
Over time, that has had a noticeable impact on the way Mixed is played. It’s shifted everything from strategy to sportsmanship. And now, as I see it, the division is really flourishing. You saw this really 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.

[00:23:04] Raha Mozaffari:
It was really awesome seeing Mosquera pulling a full field at the back of the end zone and seeing, like, the other team have to work all the way up.

[00:32:14] Jody Avirgan:
Okay, folks, we’re a little in the weeds here with Ultimate lingo here. Did you ever expect this to be happening to you? But, the pull, that’s like the kickoff. It’s very important. You try to pin your opponent deep on their side of the field

[00:23:25] Raha Mozaffari:
It was really cool seeing, like, Sarah Meckstroth, just skying a bunch of guys, taller than her.

[00:23:32] Jody Avirgan:
Skying, jumping in the air, catching the disc over your opponent. Sarah did a lot of that.

[00:23:36] Raha Mozaffari:
So many other creative throwers, like Finney. And Carolyn and Trop just making these, like, incredible catches that she shouldn't.

[00:23:46] Jody Avirgan:
All those players Raha just name-checked, they were women on the top teams. And 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.

[00:23:58] Raha Mozaffari:
So it was just the all-around like amazing display of athleticism and a unique style with men and women on the same field together and working together.

[00:24:09] Jody Avirgan:
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. If 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.

[00:25:02] Raha Mozaffari:
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, um, to be more inclusive and listen to each other and yeah, it has been good.

[00:25:17] Jody Avirgan:
Sports. 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 right now is the few first 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.

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

Next time, on Good Sport, what happens when, suddenly, you can’t play your sport anymore?


[00:26:33] Dawn Burrell:
Really it was like, oh my gosh, um, I'm in survival mode. What can I do? You know. Because I suffered the death of my, my athletic career.

[00:26:41] Jody Avirgan:
Retiring, aging, and finding your next thing.

Good Sport is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective. It’s hosted by me, Jody Avirgan. The show is produced by TED.

This episode was written and produced by Isabel Carter. Our team includes Camille Petersen, Poncie Rutsch, Sara Nics, Jimmy Gutierrez, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, and Roxanne Hai Lash. Jake Gorski is our sound designer and mix engineer. Fact-checking by Hana Matsudaira.

Special thanks this episode to Charlie Eisenhood and Dr. Sheree Bekker.

We want to hear from you. Questions, ideas, reactions. Our email is [email protected]. 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 Avirgan. See you soon!