Settling The Score

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Eugenie Bouchard asked to twirl by a male reporter, an entire university team suspended due to allegations of sexual assault and FIFA subjecting female athletes to a literally inferior playing field. It is apparent that women are not treated equally as men in sport. But The Silhouette wanted to find out, does this systemic discrimination manifest at McMaster?

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“Well I’ve been around for 28 years and it’s never occurred to me until this second that male teams have been more successful than female teams at McMaster, and I can’t actually come up with a reason [...] they could have a half day retreat to think about [gender disparity] for the staff and coaches to sit down and say, ‘we seem to have this discrepancy, and what is it, and can we do something to address it?’”

- Philip White, Professor of Kinesiology, researcher on the sociology of sport.

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The Football Conundrum

“There’s no comparable women’s team to men’s football so it does throws the comparison a little bit out of whack, if you take football out of the equation it’s fairly balanced, in some sports, the AFA numbers are more heavily weighted to female teams. Football set aside it’s a fairly balanced picture.”

- Gordon Arbeau, Direction, Public & Community Relations, McMaster

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“How do you try to balance things out with football? It’s an issue throughout sports, the gender equity issue… We try and fund women’s sport a little bit better than men’s sport, absent football. But we have limited resources. The next sport if we were to bring out a varsity sport would probably be women’s hockey”

- Glen Grunwald, Director of Athletics and Recreation, McMaster

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