10
votes
Finnish FA drops 'women's' prefix for league in push for equality – top football league to be called National League, not Women's League
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- Authors
- Marcus Christenson
- Published
- Feb 27 2020
- Word count
- 214 words
I'm going to ask a question that may seem really fucking stupid, but it must be asked if I ever want to be educated about this:
Is there a scientific consensus on (a lack of) performance disparity between male and female athletes?
What do you mean by this? There have been quite a few studies that show differences in average upper body strength and overall muscle mass between men and women.
Aside from that, in athletics where performance can be objectively measured, men outperform women
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3761733/
with a few exceptions (women seem to dominate in ultra long distance swimming).
It's harder to measure athletic performance in something like soccer, where top tier women most often compete against other women obviously. It's pretty plainly clear that there's a biological disparity between men and women in most physical sports though.
Isn't it then meaningful to preserve genderation of sports leagues? (Not asking you specifically: this is a continuation of the main comment. Feel free to answer, of course.) It seems that the issue isn't sexism: it's the fact that women do perform on a different level from men, thus providing a different set of expectations. You know, how children's leagues do: you would expect an adult male athlete to seriously outperform a child male althlete.
Of course there's also the fact that women are treated worse than they should be in sports because of sexism...
This, however, feels too crude of a way to counter this.
Yes, of course. That's not actually what the article about is though. It's just a name change. They're literally just changing their women's league's name from "Women's League" to "National League". It's still a women only league.
Personally, I think that's pretty stupid, but whatever.
I'm not sure it's particularly stupid. My understanding is that the reason they're doing it is the same reason we no longer have "women engineers" and "women comedians" and so on. It's just football, which in some cases happens to be played by women - it's not "women's football" as if the mere fact there are women playing it is worthy of note.
If you want stupid, consider how stupid the "Men's League" sounds. Same thing.
We don't refer to female engineers as "women engineers" because their sex makes no difference in engineering.
There's a practical reason why there are separate women's leagues, and the fact that you have to be a woman to play in them are their differentiating characteristic. So it's not just soccer that happens to be played by women, it's soccer that can only be played by women.
Renaming it makes about as much sense as renaming women's bathrooms to "national bathrooms". It's just needlessly confusing for no real benefit.
Comedian->Comedienne, Waiter->Waitress, any job title with "-man" in it (chairman, salesman, anchorman, etc) having a "-woman" version, despite gender making no difference there either. Which is precisely why so many people have been trying to do away with those pointlessly gendered terms, as all they really do is further reinforce stereotypes, traditional gender roles, socioeconomic division, and prejudice.
And similarly, for sports league names, ask yourself this; Why is including the "Women's" prefix seen as mandatory, but not including "Men's" for their counterparts? That seems rather unfair and potentially even sexist/misogynistic, IMO. So I say good on them for doing away with the "Women's" prefix, and I hope more leagues follow suit!
Yeah, that makes sense because they're pointlessly gendered terms. "Women's league" isn't pointlessly gendered. You have to be a woman to compete in them. If it was a league that had no restrictions to play in but just happened to have mostly women playing in it, I would agree, "women's league" would be a pointlessly gendered term for it, but you must be a woman to play in it, so being called a women's league is descriptive, not pointless. I don't know anything about soccer, but in the NBA, NFL and MLB league, there isn't actually a rule restricting women from playing on those teams, so calling them "men's leagues" would be pointlessly gendered, because there's no rule preventing women from playing in them. If there's a rule prohibiting women from playing in professional soccer, renaming it "Men's professional league" or whatever would make sense.
I don't really see how glossing over the fact that it's an all women's league with the name makes any difference in reinforcing stereotypes.
OK so if it's not a big deal then let's just rename the other leagues instead. We can have the Men's League for the fellas and the women can play in the Premier League. It's just football that can only be played by men, right?
See how that sounds a little, er, lacking in empathy? Lots of people would be upset by a change like that. So why should the women's game have to be in the same position? For the sake of a name change, which despite your concerns otherwise, I'm not convinced is really that confusing. I know football fans aren't traditionally seen as being all that bright but I'm sure even they can manage to get a handle on it. I mean, what's the worst that will happen - someone accidentally goes to a game with women in? argh! I'm not particularly a footballist but the women's games I have seen are generally rather more entertaining than the men's flavour (seems to be more skill and less brute force but that could just be me not really knowing what I'm watching)
It's sort of this. I really enjoy watching women's football, but as the men are faster (biology!), it's often harder to see the little bits of skill that take them past a defender, for example. When you slow it down, you see the subtle little change in direction or flick.
I think the women's game will get to that point soon enough, but it's only really in it's infancy on a professional level at wide scale.
I'm not sure that made sense, I'm running on very little sleep!
What do you mean? "Men's league" doesn't sound stupid. It sounds like a league that's only for men.
That's fine if it's on your local leisure centre's noticeboard for badminton or whatever, but we're not talking about casual leagues here, these are the top teams/players in the country, the main national leagues.
Perhaps I should have phrased it more as renaming a sport's elite leagues to "Men's League" (for men) and "Premier League" (for women)? Now you might well be happy with that but let's not pretend there wouldn't be many jimmies rustled among less enlightened fans. I'm not sure what country you're from but can you imagine the fuss made if it was the MFL rather than the NFL? Men's Baseball rather than Major League? I don't know what the hockey one is, but you get what I'm saying.
Now imagine you're a woman and that's how things are already. Perhaps from that perspective naming leagues for the level they're played at rather than the gender of the players doesn't seem quite so stupid.
It's the entire reason why it was introduced, to give women a chance to actually compete as well. I am personally for keeping it, but as a dude, if women really want to abolish it, they should. It would be fun, though I assume any actual athlete would be staunchly against it, because in most fields, men would just win all the time.
In athletics, it is easy to compare results. For instance, no woman has ever run a four minute mile.