EDUCATION | Driving tomorrow’s achievements
17 April 2008
Equality in Sports Participation Benefits All, Says Expert
Girls benefit in academic and professional life
Washington -- Young people, regardless of race or gender, benefit from participating in well-structured sports programs, says a sociologist who has studied the effect of sports participation on elementary and secondary school students.
Beckett Broh, an assistant professor of sociology at Wittenberg University in Ohio, published a study in 2002 in Sociology of Education that concluded that participating in athletics helps students perform well academically during high school more than any other extracurricular activity.
“They benefit developmentally in terms of building self-confidence and self-esteem and the ability to problem-solve; they develop socially in that they build relationships with students and teachers and parents that can act as resources for them in terms of their academics,” she said in an interview.
“It also seems to change who their peer groups are,” she said. “They gain social status in school, and that seems to promote a stronger engagement in the educational environment, so ... they’re less likely to drop out; they’re less likely to disengage from the classroom environment -- things like that.”
In 1972, landmark civil rights legislation banned sex discrimination in U.S. schools, both in academic subjects and in athletics. Popularly known as “Title IX,” the new law led to dramatic increases in female participation in sports at both elementary and secondary school levels and at colleges. (See “U.S. Gender-Equity Law Led to Boom in Female Sports Participation.”)
SPORTS HELP ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT
The law has had some unexpected consequences, particularly in the way sports are viewed in the context of education. Title IX “has provided many opportunities for young girls and women” to advance in a whole range of new areas, Broh said.
However, in recent years American schools have been under increasing public pressure to improve students’ achievement in core academic subjects such as math, science and reading. Extracurricular activities, including sports, sometimes have been sacrificed.
“There’s certainly a ‘back to basics,’” Broh said. “At the same time, the prevailing [educational] philosophy is that student development is much more than their intellectual being and that their development emotionally and development socially impacts their ability to maximize their intellectual capabilities.”
In fact, a study published in 2007 on some long-term benefits of sports showed that playing on a high school sports team increased a young woman’s chances of graduating from college by 41 percent. That study should be taken into account if schools are considering cutting athletic programs in an era of tight budgets, Broh said.
Links also have been found between girls’ participation in sports in middle school and high school and their achievement in adult life, such as success in the business world, where such sports values as teamwork, goal-setting and the pursuit of excellence are prized.
“It is no accident that 80 percent of the female executives at Fortune 500 companies identified themselves as former ‘tomboys’ -- having played sports,” the Women’s Sports Foundation says on its Web site.
Girls who play sports in school are “less likely to get pregnant outside of marriage, they are more likely to have higher incomes. So long-term benefits have definitely been documented,” Broh said.
STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
In her research, Broh found a common thread among activities that enhanced achievement: they were structured by an adult or a professional. Kids who participated in unstructured intramural sports (within a school) not only did not get the same benefit as those in interscholastic sports (between or among schools), “they seemed to do worse academically because of their participation,” Broh said.
“The second common thread,” she said, “seemed to be that there had to be a social element to it -- that they had to engage with their peers and with educators and that those relationships really seem to matter. So for kids taking violin lessons, you wouldn’t expect to see the same benefit as participating in the orchestra, for example.”
One criticism of Title IX that concerns Broh is that, paradoxically, it may have damaged the careers of women coaches.
“Title IX pretty much cleaned house of women college coaches and replaced what was a majority profession of women with a majority of men because salaries went up, because status and prestige went up, and women were not considered to be qualified candidates anymore to run these programs. So, since 1972, we’ve seen a huge change in the gender composition of women’s sports college coaches from female to male,” she said.
Critics of Title IX sometimes have charged that opportunities for women to play sports have come at men’s expense. “Men have been privileged for centuries in terms of having way more than their share of the pie, and when we feel that women’s advancements are coming at the expense of men’s, we have to remember that if there’s only so much pie to go around, we have to look at the equality of how that pie is shared,” Broh said.
“When we say we take away from male athletics, we fail to look at the benefits to men as well as to women when we create equality. All the research shows that the greater the equality between men and women, the greater the outcomes for both. The economy does better, families do better, everybody does better.”
