WOMEN IN SPORTS DESERVE EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

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.