Yeah, I never got the impression that soccer was a woman’s sport. Certainly when I was growing up women’s soccer was more popular because the US women’s soccer team was better, and compared to the men’s soccer team had much bigger names (like Mia Hamm). But just because it was bigger didn’t mean than anyone considered it a women’s sport. Certainly not in the same way American football is a “men’s sport” or softball is a “girl’s sport”.
Hockey is definitely considered a women’s sport in Britain. There’s no doubt about it.
Here’s the results of a Google search for “field hockey”.
Of course you’re not going to find any official proclamations that the sport is For Girls. But, at the time of posting, in the top 10 rows of photos 38 of the pictures show women and girls playing the sport, 5 show men and boys playing it. I could have kept going for many more rows (just keep scrolling down and see for yourself) but 10 rows of field hockey is enough for one day. Just calling it as I see it with my own mad Google skills.
You’ll find similar results with other sports typically seen as girls sports (such as volleyball).
Slight correction. It’s not considered a women’s sport. It’s considered a sport for schoolgirls, particularly at exclusive girls-only private schools.
…and what has that got to do with hockey in England or the rest of the world, which was the specific point I was talking about? Take the word “field” out (as the rest of the world call the game Hockey, not Field Hockey), add the word England, and what happens to your search result? The first four images for me are mens games, and well over 50% of the images are mens teams. If we are to trust your badly flawed methodology then it seems pretty obvious to me hockey isn’t regarded as a “women’s sport” in England. Your “mad google skills” obviously need some work.
This says to me hockey is comparatively a sport for women in England, though I would agree that, in absolute terms, more men play, as those numbers are inarguable. The comparative I’m thinking of is with all the other team sports in the UK - if you looked at the number of men’s v women’s football, rugby, cricket and doubtless many other sports teams in the UK (or England, seeing as those are the figures above), then the number of women’s teams would be nowhere near 80% of the men’s total. This is probably where the impression we have in the UK of it as a sport for women comes from - the vast disparity between male and female participation elsewhere skews our perspective.
In Canada, when I was growing up in the '80s, ice hockey was almost exclusively played by boys, broomball was played by boys and girls, and ringette was…well, if your sport’s name ends in “ette”, guess who it’s targeting?
It’s pretty common at public high schools in New England. I wasn’t aware of any private school connection, at least in this area.
There are a few boys on girls’ HS field hockey teams. The boys’ ice-hockey goalie played field hockey too in my town recently. They have to be allowed to play as long as there are no boys’ teams.
I don’t see anyone providing a story as to why it’s seen as a girls-only game in North America, other than that boys just never started playing it much. There’s no logical reason for that.
This. In upstate New York at least, soccer and lacrosse are both extremely popular among the preppy/upper middle class crowd, but certainly not associated with any gender.
My guess for why field hockey is gendered, in a way - Article 9. Not too many women play ice hockey.
http://www.fofweb.com/History/MainPrintPage.asp?iPin=NAS0420&DataType=AmericanHistory&WinType=Free
It was tried and never caught on. Too many other men’s sports to compete with and no history of the sport in the US. It was introduced as a women’s sport largely through the efforts on one educator through the high end colleges in the northeast and spread from there.
Mine too. I played not-ice hockey all the way through (UK) prep school and at my private secondary school (and have a piece of plastic embedded in my shinbone to prove it). It was certainly more popular among women then men, but that’s just because it was behind rugby, [association] football and cricket. On the womens’ side it was only behind netball, because there weren’t that many girls who had played lacrosse before.
This policy depends on the state. In California, for example, while girls can’t be barred from playing on “boys” teams if there is no equivalent girls’ team (and I have seen girls qualify for California’s state “boys” wrestling championship tournament), boys can be barred from playing on “girls” teams even when there is no boys’ team, if the ratio of boys to girls in all sports at that school matches or exceeds the student body ratio (which usually means, “If the school has a football team, then forget it”).
I assume you mean Title IX - and field hockey being “women’s only” in the USA predates Title IX by decades, just as softball in schools being women’s only does.