History Essay: Gender Norms in Sports

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Gender Norms in Sports
The social standards that define what actions are accepted and are right for men and women can be referred to as gender norms. Gender norms play the role of shaping how men and women access freedom and resources, which affects how they feel, their voice, and their power. Sports culture provides a suitable environment to analyze and understand how society views gender. Before modernization, women's role in society was to take care of the homestead and their families while men participated in other fields. As industrialization continued to spread, civilization became a package where people changed their view of women's role in society. Women began to be involved in social, political, and economic activities that aimed at developing society. There has been an increase in women's number in sports and entertainment (Senne, Joshua 7). In this essay, a comparison of women's involvement in rugby in France and Japan and how it has fought against gender norms will be discussed.
The sports sector helps people understand the way society designs social structures of women and men who take part in sports and how feminism and masculinity are allocated in social bodies. In Japan and France, the sports sector has been a male-dominated area for a long time, which led to the policymakers of gender equality, focusing on the area. In Japan, women's participation in games like rugby was not known in the late 1980s. In the year 1969, the minister for sports in France termed rugby being inappropriate for women because of psychological reasons that he said were obvious. Society's stereotypes of gender can explain gender inequality in men's and women's ratios in the sports sector. According to the developing and still developing society, a man is strong, athletic, and independent, while the woman is viewed as a nurturer, attractive, quiet, and obedient (Hyre, Tess, Steve, and Monica 220). Compared to the past, women's representation in athletics has increased, and women have started having an equal representation in this sector.
The revolution of women being involved in sports in France began in the 1980s, but it took place in sports like football, which is a game that has big media coverage and is male dominated. The rugby federation of France remains one of the sports sectors will few women involved in the sport. Like France, the revolution of women's involvement in sports in japan took place in the 1980s, but in this case, women were fighting for their involvement in rugby. A woman named Noriko will forever be remembered in the history of Japan for her bravery and determination to fight for gender equality in sports. Noriko comes up with a rugby team that consisted of her and her friends, and they faced hostility and ridicule from society. Although they had broken Japan's social conventions of the 1980s, they emerged victorious despite their humble genesis.
The Japan rugby team became powerful and was recognized at a national level to a point where they represented Japan in the women's world cup. From an interview by a UK media house, Noriko says that ever since she started playing, she has always had a sense of belonging in the society, and the game helps her...