A Brief History of Globalization and Women in Sport

The true beginning of sport is unknown but artifacts and structures would suggest that the Chinese engaged in sporting activities as early as 4000 BC. Sport has long been a means of enjoyment and competition with the only rewards being pride and glory. In early sport women were not allowed to compete as sport was said to be for men alone. Though we are a long time removed from women being excluded from sports, they are still treated unfairly when compared to men’s professional athletes of today. The first Olympic Games recorded were in 776 BC in Olympia, Greece. Roughly 2,676 years later Women were allowed to compete in the Olympics for the first time in 1900. Nineteen women would be allowed to compete in just three different events compared to the 19 events offered for male athletes.

Some of the more modern sports of today started surfacing in the 1600’s when gambling also became a popular habit. This is no coincidence as sports during the 1600’s such as Horse Racing, Boxing and Cricket were often bet upon for entertainment. This was the shift toward spectator sports where people started to become interested in sport and wanted to view these sports first hand. The importance of team sport was first seen in the 1600’s as Cricket teams wanted to field the best team to benefit them and their bets they placed on their team.

With the Industrial Revolution sport went more away from the rural scene and found its way into the city where middle and upper class people became drawn to it. This shift brought more interest and in turn more money into the industry of sport. Because Industrialization and mass production created more leisure time there was a shift in sport from dominant competitors to a more balanced field of competition. Once we reach the 1900’s professionalism becomes a big part of sport as athletes start to focus on sport as a career and not just a form of enjoyment. This would only add to the popularity of sports and in the 1900’s sport would become more important economically year by year.

In 1964 Phillip Knight and Bill Bowerman would create Blue Ribbon Sports which would later become known as Nike. Phillip Knight would show up at Track and Field events to push his now famous shoes to anyone he could out of the back of his van. Through years of professional athlete sponsorship and eventually frequent advertising Nike would grow to become the biggest sports apparel company in the world. Now Nike owns over 700 factories in more than 45 countries outside of the United States. These factories are sites of cheap labor through exploitation of minorities in other countries. From selling shoes out of a van to exploiting millions of people for cheap labor Nike serves as one of the best examples of globalization within sports.

In 1972 Title 9 was introduced at the collegiate and high school level forcing public institutions to provide the same number of scholarship sports for guys and girls and the same number of sports for men and women at the high school level. Now women’s professional sports are starting to surface as we work our way into the twenty first century but still they draw only a fraction of economic worth as compared to men’s professional sports. In 1997 the first season of the WNBA was under way, 51 years after the inception of the NBA. In 2005 a team salary cap in the WNBA was somewhere around $.67 million where a salary cap in the NBA hovers around $44 million. These statistics merely serve as an example of the difference between men’s and women’s professional sport today. Women are still forced to take up work outside of their respective sport as the economic funding women’s professional sports receive is not nearly enough for athlete’s to live off of. From a form of sheer enjoyment to an exploiting money hungry business, sports have mutated into an industry no longer concerned with its original purpose.

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