Jan 17, 2015 2 min read

I am sounding off about a photo of some girls scrambling for a basketball during a game between McGuffey and Trinity high schools that was featured on the front page of your sports section in the Tuesday edition.

I am sure that if it was a boys game and the same type of photo was available, the newspaper probably wouldn’t have used it. Instead, there would have been some impressive shot with a couple of boys driving to the basket, serious and macho. How often do you see candid photos of boys in less-than-flattering sports situations? I have noticed that newspapers historically like to run athletic pictures of girls in scrappy and sometimes embarrassing poses in proportionately more photos than their male counterparts.

Now why is this?

First of all, let me say that this is an industry-wide characteristic, not just something I have noticed in the Observer-Reporter. However, I think that there is an underlying attitude here that needs to be addressed, and that is this: regardless of how much headway women’s sports have made in the last 40 years, there is still an element of amusement about it, and that females in sports should not be taken seriously.

Is this sexist? If I were the parent of one of those girls, I’d think so.

And no, I’m not a mothballed women’s libber from the 1960s. I have a family and was fortunate enough to do some coaching. But I remember an entire generation that sat by while their male counterparts basked in developmental programs and high school feed-in programs so the boys could enjoy the benefits of sports as an extracurricular activity, as well as a means to obtain scholarship help.

Yes, we’ve come a long way, baby. But has our culture really accepted the position and respect that girls have worked so hard to achieve? I don’t think so. Not as long as photos like the one used Tuesday are used with a subliminal message slanted against women. Even though we might not want to admit it, our male-dominated society is still a work in progress.

Sally Brown-Pawlosky

Hickory