Sports is one of the most popular activities of mankind across the world. It is well valued between all ages, gender and races. However, in early years of modern Olympics, women were not well represented. Women participated for the first time at the 1900 Paris games only in tennis and golf. Then, women’s athletics and gymnastics started in the Olympics 1928. Through time, more women's events were added. In 2012, women's boxing was introduced, resulting with no remaining sports that do not include events for women (Top end sports, 2010).
Furthermore, in Rio 2016, 28 sports were included in the Olympics for both Men and Women. Soon in Tokyo 2020, five new sports will be added to the Olympics, this means that sports in evolving throughout the years (Olympic News, 2018).
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For a long time women have been projected to live up to traditional roles in major societies. This resulted in women being discouraged from the contribution in several sectors in the society, including participating and competing in sports. Throughout the years, sport assigned limited role to women by eliminating them from contributing and then fighting to include them (Woods, 2016).
The United Nations goals aims at encouraging gender equality and empowering women through sport. In 1970, Title IX on the gender equity has been formulated in the USA and was legislated in 1972 by President Richard Nixon to adjust college athletics. This title ban sex discrimination in any educational program. Title IX has produced a revolution in sports participation for women. A huge jump of girl’s participation in sports at High school with athletic budgets and scholarship but until now women in sports continue to lag behind men.
Sportsmen’s control media coverage and still obtain universal attention that impact the media of sportswomen. Besides, media is involved in maintaining the official process of discouraging women’s participation in sports, as the media’s attention and focus is mainly on male competitors, placing them in the limelight and keeping women in the shadows. This lack of attention could then allow society to easily conclude that sportswomen have very little value, and girls should not strive for this type of career (Khalaf, 2014).
According to the study made by OHIO University (2014), the average salary for Women coaching are unequal to the men’s. Because Women’s programs lack of funding and sponsorship. The problem is that Women have no media exposure to let people feel that they are worthy to watch.
If a woman has reached a very prominent level in sports, by which she is known all over the world, the media tend to associate her with something bad, while men are mostly associated with success. Photographs of sportswomen are often individualized, sexualized, and accompanied by references to their marital status, private lives, femininity, and personal problems. In contrast, the high coverage of male sports makes it appealing to boys to become a sportsman. These sportsmen are often looked upon as heroes (Khalaf, 2014).
Men have dominated sports in the Middle East over the years, so women face ongoing battles for sports rights. As it is commonly known in most of Arab countries, women participation in sports are neglected altogether and physical education is banned in all-girls public schools and universities. According to the government of Arab countries, sport is a serious threat to traditional values.
Sports scene in Lebanon is known with the imbalance between male and female participants. In Lebanon, women were first incorporated in the national teams for international competition in 1950 and since then women have represented Lebanon in all these competitions. However, there are more male sports players, administrators and representatives than female in all national sports federations, academics, and especially in the official committees that accompany athletes to the World Sports Championships or Olympics.
Although the implementation of Title IX had led to impressive gains for women’s athletics but the playing field is still far from level. So, why we have low representation for Women in sports? What are the actions that could be taken to make a difference? And what are the changes needed to increase Women leadership in Lebanese sports?
The purpose of the study is to assess gender representation in sport participation and leadership in Lebanon as well as identifying opportunities and detecting the needed changes. As Women being engaged in the sport field area, this thing has pushed us to look into what men and women, already in the sports field, what they think about women in team leadership positions, and why they feel that way. Moreover, if there was a complaint, how they feel about it and what needs to be done for women to develop their leadership chances (Aly, 2018).
To our knowledge, researches such as Margaret Lovelin & Maylon Hanold, 2015 only emphasis on numbers and percentages of women in sports rather than the reasons behind why there is or is not an underrepresentation of them. However, the main aspects that we want to stress out are the constraints in female coaching, equal pay, media coverage, representation as athletes and team sports leadership. Men were viewed as being able to handle the aspect of teamwork better than women, and players find difficulties to trust or listen to a female in a position of authority over them.
Women representation in sports is critical today, so we need to gain insight from both sides, men and women who already hold these positions. This study benefits all people in sport field in general and in particular Lebanese people that are journalists, TV reporters, fans, administrators, athletes, physical education (PE) students and coaches.
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