Women in Sports

While reading our discussion boards this week, a lot of people mentioned a girl sport compared to a guy sport. I think this weekend I had a very eye opening experience in terms of breaching that gap. As a reporter at the Missourian, I decided to help out with the Show-Me State Games this weekend(July 20). I was asked to go to the powerlifting competition at Lange Middle School. When I got there I didn't really know what to expect out of what I needed to look for. We are asked to look at the "clips" before we go on assignment to see what we shouldn't do in terms of stories. The last one we did was on an older man who was the oldest man to compete that year. Well, I go into the school and see a lot of muscular guys. On the other side of the auditorium however were a group of ladies, all ranging in age, bench pressing before they began to lift. While these ladies were not lifting a bunch of weight, I was stunned that there were this many women at the competition. I pulled out my iPhone to check if we had done a story over their group but we apparently did in 2012. While I was very impressed that so many women were involved in the powerlifting competition, I was slightly disappointed that many of them were on the smaller side of how much weight they put on the bar. I thought that even though they were competing in this male dominated sport they still appeared feminine. They mainly stayed within 100-150 lbs. I felt that even though they were breaking this barrier that we have it is still done in a feminine way and with preconceived notions that women can not do as much as men can do. So while they are breaking this gender norm, they are still portraying this feminine notion that doesn't help equalize their status within this sport. For those interested, here is the story that I found at the powerlifting competition on Saturday!