With the fruition of gender roles over time, many
male subject sports organizations have decided to open up women’s divisions.
Many of the women’s divisions are being created due to how perceptions of women
have begun to change in our society and the country as a whole, as women today
have started to develop more interest and independence in relation to sports.
Individual outstanding women’s division that has
been created in recent years in Ghana is the football division. Throughout the
history of the football, most of the attention is usually focused on the male
football, and hardly any coverage is given to the women football in the
country.
However, with the change in gender roles in
our society, many female in the country have started to view themselves in
different sports disciplinarians. Even though women sports have become more
prominent in our society, I wonder how and when these women get their
allowance.
It hurts me to see the great sports women up there
doing marvelous but do not get motivation, supports and
empowerment from the heads of their disciplinarians while
playing.
Specially, the football divisions do face the
non-payment of qualification bonuses and other financial commitments from the Ghana
Football Association (GFA). There have been instance some of the women are not
being paid at all, others thirty percent (30%) of it.
There have a
number of times when the Black Queens and the Black Princesses do not get
access to their allowance on time but you hardly find that in the Blackstars,
Blackmeteors, and Blacksatellites.
The development of gender roles in our society has
shown a significant change in how women are represented in sports. The growth
of women’s sports has been shown by the creation of various professional sports
leagues for women include the national women championship league (NWCL), Women
National Boxing Association (WNBA), women Hockey (WHL), Women Athletics
Association (GAA) and others in the country.
National
Women's League Board and Black Queens Management Committee Chairperson, Madam
Leanier Addy is frustrated that female players don’t get much attention
from the mainstream media, Ministry of sports, GFA and feminist activists alike.
"There is relatively low volume of reporting
and comparatively low duration of air time given to female sport when compared
to women's success and participation rates implicitly give male sports more
significance than female sports in Ghana television," she said.
"Our
young people, boys and girls, get to see ... that women can lead, they can be
coaches, they can be star athletes, That’s important for our young men and
women to see, that their mum, their sister, their partner, their wife can be
... involved in professional women's sport when they are promoted through media
coverage and support from the government’’ she further stated.
Because of the change of equal representation
in women’s sports, more female have begun to participate in sports compared to
those of the past.
The large increase of female participation in sports
seems to be related to the rapid growth of many professional women’s sports
leagues and also women have started to completely change how they are viewed in
the sports world by participating in male subjected sports. This shows how
women have considerably changed how they are viewed in the sporting world.The
biggest disparities in prize money are usually found in football.
It is found coverage of male sport made up 81 per
cent of television sports news coverage, compared to women at 7.4 per cent.
Coverage had also declined in recent years, with women's sport making up about
11 per cent of television sport programming a decade ago.
Breakdown of sport coverage
|
Gender
|
Overall
|
GTV
|
Tv3
|
Metro TV
|
|
Male sport
|
81.1%
|
80.7%
|
84.8%
|
81.4%
|
|
Female sport
|
7.4%
|
11.2%
|
8.9%
|
7.8%
|
"To put this into context,We've got wonderful
sporting women in this country that set the standard on the Olympic stage, on
the world stage, in many sports yet we still seek to get similar coverage,Some
of our individual athletes are actually much more successful than many male
athletes in this country’ said
The Secretary General of the Ghana Athletics Association, Mr. Bawah Fuseini.
It is, however, disappointing that in this
twenty-first century women still find themselves having to battle
for equal reward in elite sports. Whereas the men are mostly reward seventy
percent of prize money than the women.
I will like to encourage that a number of
sports heads in the country who have taken the positive step towards prize
money parity, and this shows that the momentum currently building behind
women's sport is having an impact.
I think that sports heads also have to change
their towards professional women’s sports by being sense of balance and
fairness because women’s sport is very exciting.
It's hard to say but I think it takes courageous
executives in the media to get behind women's sport and promote the fact that
it's about equal opportunity.
