Sports - A Man Thing?

 For my blog today I’ve decided to visit the Aspire4Sport conference held in the Aspire Sports Academy here in Doha. I went there while considering in mind how does gender, and prescribed gender roles play a part in sport? The conference attracts hundreds of sport professionals from all over the world, and was a great chance to meet and listen to legends in each sector.

The first thing I noticed was the blue color that cover most of the academy and was heavily used in the booths and walls constructed for the conference. If blue, and especially darker shades of it, is culturally prescribed to masculinity, then the academy definitely give the idea that this is a place for boys and men. The huge pictures of sport legends such as Pele of Brazil and Zidane of France certainly give emphasize the idea of masculinity in sports and limit the presence of femininity.

Out of all the visitors and speaker that were invited, I noticed that Serena Williams, the world-class tennis player, was one of five female speakers in the conference compared to 72 male speakers over the course of three days that the event is held. This could be explained because sports are just more appealing to men and therefore more of the male genders are involved in it. Another explanation can be due to the biological sex features that give men advantages over women in sports such as soccer and rugby. Or do these explanation have any truth at all?

As a kid I remember loving football because I used to watch a cartoon show called Captain Majid. It was a typical Japanese comic cartoon that tells the story of a football team and their super captain those scores from a hundred yards away. If it was not for that cartoon, and the genrder nroms that allowed be to watch such a show as a young boy, would I even have loved the sport as much today? I doubt it.