I teach at a public school that includes grades 7 and 8. We have the standard sports except football, which is played through a league in the city.
I try to go to at least one game per season for every sport. Consistently, there are more parents in attendance for the boys’ sporting events than at the girls’ sporting events. It’s not like I need to count. The numbers are very noticeable.
It seems to me that the attendance should be equal. Most families have a mix of boys and girls, and at our school almost everyone plays at least one sport.
For one, girls tend to play less-exciting sports like volleyball and tennis and gymnastics (in regards to crowd participation). People enjoy watching full-contact sports more–they’re more spectator-friendly. Also, guys are the ones who make the biggest bucks as professional athletes. Parents and the general community are bound to be more supportive of a guy who could be the next Michael Jordan than a girl who could be the next Billie Jean King.
Also take into consideration that a teenage guy playing school sports is more likely to want to be a professional athlete than a teenage girl playing school sports. Therefore, they’re more likely to be proactive in asking their family members and friends to attend their games. How many teenaged guys express the desire to be pro-athletes? A lot more than teenaged females.
Gender roles also come into play. Participating in sports and getting sweaty is a manly activity, stereotypically. Girls sexualize guys who play sports. But guys don’t tend to sexualize female athletes. Female athletes are more likely to get labeled as mannish proto-lesbians. Women “should be” (not my words) softer and unathletic and desirous of manly protection. A girl who can kick her date’s ass is viewed as intimidating by many guys, and that’s an undesirable consequence for many ladies. This creates a smaller pool of “good” athletes for women, so the girls who barely make it onto the women’s team aren’t as good as the boys who barely make it onto the guys’ team.
And lastly, there are lots of women who are afraid to work out because they don’t want to look “bulky.” The idealized version of feminine beauty in the first world is a girl who is skinny-fat. That is, petite, small, and hairless below the neck, with large breasts, a soft tummy, and rounded edges who exudes a gentle, perfumed mist. Whereas the image of male beauty is tall, muscled, tough, sweaty, hairy, and musky. It’s no surprise that people in general get more of a kick from watching attractive guys get sweaty on the field than from females who are bucking their gender stereotype by even participating.
In general, boys have nothing against abusing a mismatch to win. This is the source of a lot of excitement in school sports. Girls try to be more circumspect about it - which makes the ones who will take advantage all the more memorable.
My wife teaches PE at a elementary/middle school and the same thing is happening there. Our daughter played middle school basketball last year and the boys team always played first, then the girls game was held right after. It was amazing to see the “crowd” empty out as soon as the boys were done playing. I would say that the girls got about a 1/4 or less spectators than the boys. Most of the spectators were family, very few students stayed to see the girls play. Always made me feel somewhat bad for the girls, even though they played quite a bit better than the boys did.
You’re saying they could have beat the boy’s team? It would be quite unusual at any level of basketball (and essentially all other sports) that females could outplay males of the same age and experience.
Which is no doubt an important part of the answer to the OP’s question: spectators tend to prefer watching more skilled athletes. Examples include major-league baseball vs. minor-league, and PGA vs. LPGA.
Mo, I don’t think they could beat the boys. However, the gorl’s games were more interesting to watch. The teams were closer in ability. The boy’s teams always seemed to be blowouts for one side or the other.
The simple answer is that the boys’ games are attended by more than just immediate family members. Family friends, school friends, interested local citizens are just more likely to go to boys’ games because the level of play is more captivating.
I’m not offering that as my opinion, but that’s the way people think about it. They don’t see a competive basketball game played by girls to be exciting. Attitudes about sports in general are highly influenced by the media which maintains the traditional male culture oriented view of sports. And media hype is crucial to the existence of team sports, even at the primary school level. If high school girls could pose in body paint like adult women athletes, they’d start drawing bigger crowds.
In this case I’m guessing that because the girls were playing right after a lot of the people at the boys games were there because the girls were playing next and they got there early.
I don’t think many women’s sporting events draw a lot of people so it’s not just middle and high school girls teams.
Society has a more dismissive attitude towards girls in sports. Athletic girls are not taken as seriously as their male counterpoints, because they’re perceived as inferior. So girl games are treated like an afterthought. Unfortunately, I think we have a culture of “why waste time watching those silly weaklings play a boy’s sport when we could just watch watch the boys?”
When it comes to entertainment in general (music, movies, TV), we have a pro-male bias. So it’s not surprising that the same bias carries over to spectatorship.
In general because they suck. I’ll watch my little girl play every friggin’ second because I love her, but it’s suicide-inducing.
I’ll WAG that, say, 13 y.o girls play at the level of boys 8 y.o., and it’s boring to watch a sport played badly for the age/size of the girls.
In Peru, volleyball is THE female sport (and a guy playing it alwayas has his masculinity suspect), an Olympic silver medal, a second place in the wolrd championship and (until a couple of years) generally at the top of the second tier. The national female team gets creamed by under the 18 men’s team, and you have to consider that volleyball gets the best female athletes and volleyball is a 5th or 6th option in men.
You wouldn’t think that boys would be better than girls in middle school (esp. when the girls develop first), but even there they are. My sister played basketball and I remember the girl’s teams having a lot of scores like 30-16, while the boys had scores like 60-56.
Also, random anecdote, but at my high school the girl’s volleyball team always had more spectators than the men’s. Hmm…
And I’m willing to concede that that makes sense for professional adult, college, and possibly even high school sports.
But middle school sports aren’t going to be great athletic events regardless of gender. They’re not community events. I can’t imagine that they have random spectators the way that sports played at higher levels do. The overwhelming majority of attendants have got to be relatives of the players, their classmates, or their teachers.
And I would guess, that on average, the girls have the same number of relatives, classmates, and teachers that the boys do - so the question to me is why are those people more willing to show up for their sons than their daughters?
Yeah to all of this. If superiority on the field was the deciding factor, then why attend any sporting events for kids? They’re all inferior players.
To put it plainly, society rallies behind men and boys who are going to “battle” for them. Girls and women aren’t expected to go to “battle” so their efforts on the field get ignored, even by family members. We, as a society, also like to align ourselves with men. We are proud to have guys represent us, because men are strong and capable. In contrast, to be associated with anything feminine is embarrassing; we recoil at the thought of being represented by a bunch of weak, emotional girls. Which is why girl team’s usually aren’t called, for example, the “Tigers”. They get called the “Tigerettes”. You know, so that no one is tricked into thinking that they’re really representing the true mascot.
Yall know that this is how people feel. Let’s keep it real.
I actually think it’s far more nuanced than many are saying; lots of people seem to be saying “it’s because they’re more interested in the boys, always have been always will be that’s sexism for ya”.
What I’ve seen (active spectator to a middle school brother just a couple years ago) is that after elementary school only the really good girls keep going with sports. There are fewer of them and they are often on “travel” teams that compete on the weekends. Their parents are just as involved as the boys’ parents – some moreso. But numerically, there are simply fewer of them. Or perhaps the boys’ teams had “cuts” and 3rd stringers whereas the girls only have second stringers.
Also, the popular girls sports – like soccer, lacrosse, tennis, softball – lend themselves to year-round participation (eta training, not participation) and weekends away, therefore only a few “big matches” matter per year. Girls sports are not at their peak in the winter (such as indoor sports bball or volleyball).
Additionally, girls are far more likely than boys to compete in two sports. Boys often must focus on just one to be excellent at it whereas it’s likely a girl can swing two due to sheer numbers. So you could also be witnessing the girls’ “bad” sport. Fanatical parents who are 110% in support of their kids’ primary sports will disappear during their secondary sports.
Whereas it’s much more of a “come one, come all!” cattle call for middle school boys in sports. At that point the boys themselves and the parents of the middle athletes still think their kids “has a shot” to make varsity in high school. Many of these kids are average; average height or speed or whatever but the parents and the coaches harbor hope they will improve.