Robert Lapchick

In Robert Lapchick's articles, based on gender and race hiring practices of media institutes that cover sports and professional and college sports organizations, the information forces the reader to realize the reality of discrimination within the sports community.

Gender roles and stereotypes affect every member of our society. From the moment of birth restrictions and expectations, some subtle and others loud, are placed upon the shoulders of each person. Although some members of society seem to partially shed these notions, the majority overwhelms much of what is accepted as our culture and radical labels appear to place these outcasts into a conflicted group with the vocabulary dissolving into the mainstream. In this study Lapchick creates statistics that anchor sports into a crossroads. Although lip service has been paid to taking the more difficult path and creating a more fair environment, it is still to early to tell how serious the sporting world will take this problem.

The most obvious flaw for me within the study was the lack of accounting for visibility. For example, the NBA received a B+ rating for gender. What major and visible female figures within the league however are acknowledged or even known about by the public? There are a few referees, which are the only female's associated with the NBA that I, as a consistent fan could tell someone about.

Without active, visible members a league is not promoting diversity, but only seemingly filling a quota. This statement is wildly unfair because I am sure women have a vital role in positions all over male dominated sports that are incredibly important and valuable to the league as a whole. Unfortunately, these institutions give us no evidence of any kind to support these facts.

Football is widely perceived as the most masculine sport within our culture. Only a tiny fraction of the female population ever plays the game and the boundaries to overcome for those who do are immense. Unthoughtout stigmas and stereotypes about girls in "contact" sports further perpetuate themselves, creating more and more history of what femininity is in sports, which in turn creats a more and more difficult challenge to overcome.

How then do these stereotypes become broken? Great moments of broken barriers are prevalent throughout the history of sport, Jackie Robinson, Babe Didrikson, Tony Dungy/Lovie Smith Super bowl, Tiger Woods, if his reputation survives, Woody Harrelson in White Men Can't Jump (maybe a stretch), etc. These are remembered however as apparitions instead of a culmination of smaller events that slowly changed the mindset of a few and then a whole.

What sports organizations and the media that cover sports should attempt to examine is their day to day small, unnoticed acts of generalization, racism, sexism, homophobia, and overall close mindedness that everyone creates within their own individual lives. Without these small checkmarks that allow us to hold onto our unchallenged ideologies, new monumental achievements will open up creating more breakthroughs in the field of sports.