Why can’t women be sports fans without having to justify themselves?

By Danielle Jenkins

Misogyny in sports is not new but in recent years it’s seen a spike, especially on social media, where men feel safe spewing hate from behind screens.

The number of female fans watching sports has grown rapidly, but there are still more male fans, particularly in sports such as hockey and football, which results in a sense of them taking the game more seriously than female fans.

A prime example of this comes from ice hockey and football fans. Both sports are heavily male dominated and are advertised towards men, which reinforces their prejudice. This can lead to female fans at games being subjected to comments such as; ‘You’re only here because you like a certain player’, ‘Do you even know the rules?’, and many more degrading comments that imply female fans aren’t there for the same reason they are.

This often deters female fans away from these sports or away from showing that they have any interest in the games, which reinforces the marketing narrative that only men are interested but it simply isn’t true.

Female fans often won’t wear merch of their favourite athletes or teams, due to fear of being questioned by men about their interest in the sport. For example: many female Formula one fans online have said they have been asked to name champions from well over a decade ago when they have been out in public (or even at races) wearing their team or drivers’ merch.

In the case of female hockey fans, they are accused of only being there because of books or TV shows (Heated Rivalry, a recent hockey show, is a good example of this). Meanwhile many of the fans play hockey themselves or have been fans since they were kids. Incidentally, you can’t even see so called ‘hot players’ when you’re watching, making this claim meaningless.

And when women don’t attend games alone, say for example they go with a male friend, it’s immediately assumed they’ve been ‘forced there’ by their boyfriend or husband. This is especially true for football, because according to a portion of male football fans, no woman really cares about or understands the sport like them, and it is where we see the most misogyny in sports.

Of course, misogyny in sports isn’t new but social media makes it more obvious and it’s having negative effects on the sports these sexists claim to love. It results in women viewing football as unsafe, formula one as too hard to understand, ice hockey as a male only thing and so on, it’s just a bad atmosphere to keep pushing and yet they do. And why? Because intentionally or not, the sports let them.

Male fans (and even athletes) are seldom punished for their negative behaviours and big sports companies don’t do much to encourage female fans. Instead, they cater to the same toxic fanbase and we are slowly but surely, starting to see the negative effects it has.

As more sports branch off to have ‘women versions’, for example, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), separate from the National Hockey League (NHL), we start to see female fans switching, becoming more inclined to support a league that supports them and giving less attention to a league that still treats them as second class citizens and allows their fans, and often their athletes, to get away with hateful behaviour towards women.