A lot has changed since the 1848 women’s rights movement. There are female voters, female presidential candidates, and now, even female football coaches.
Mesa Preparatory Academy’s head football coach, Amy Arnold, is believed to be one of the first females in the country to hold such a position. What’s more, Arnold runs an all-female coaching staff.
When Arnold started her position in 2008, news of her employment was met with skepticism from parents, students, and administration that questioned whether a woman could really make the cut in a man’s sport.
Although Arnold eventually won the support of Mesa Prep, she had to prove herself first. If she would have accepted a job as a nurse, a teacher, or even a receptionist no one would have questioned her qualifications. But because she was hired for a job usually applied for by males, her performance was now under public scrutiny.
Former Mesa Prep athletic director Jean-Mark O’Connor, the man responsible for hiring Arnold, told Arizona Republic reporter Scott Bordow that when it comes to women’s place in predominantly male professions, "not enough people have decided that it's not about gender anymore but capability."
But even coach Arnold may be guilty of this.
"I honestly don't think there's a lot of room for femininity in coaching football," Arnold said in the article. My first thought after reading this statement (other than “duh”) was what does femininity, or even masculinity, have to do with performing one’s job? Does a male nurse act differently because he’s in a socially anticipated female profession, or does ASU coach Kevin Boyd try to be less masculine because he coaches women’s soccer?
Arnold’s statement does what O’Connor preaches against — it puts the focus on gender when it should be on performance.
Answering the reporter’s question of if there’s room for a woman in football, Arnold replies, "A woman, yes. But passive? No.”
Wait a second; all women are passive now? And being passive is a female trait? For someone who faced judgment simply because of her gender, Arnold seems to be doing a great job stereotyping.
Arnold is at least realistic in understanding where these stereotypes come from. “There's a stigma with a male-dominated sport," she told Bordow, perhaps stating the obvious. "The barriers are there."
But Arnold’s statement could be addressing more than just women and football. It challenges our notions about women’s place in other professions too.
Just look at statistics of firefighters, another predominantly male profession, where women make up fewer than 4 percent of the work force. According to the United Press International, the International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services found that 85 percent of women firefighters surveyed felt treated differently, while half felt shunned or socially isolated. Thirty-seven percent of these women even felt that their gender affected their chances of career advancement — and these are just the women who were actually hired. The research shows that “women firefighters are simply not being hired,” reported UPI.
While America may be the great land of opportunity, when it comes to being a place of equal opportunity, women are often left out of the picture.
Take the wage gap for instance. “Women working full time — not part time, not on maternity leave, not as consultants — still earn only 77 cents for every full-time male dollar,” say Evelyn Murphy and E.J Graff. Murphy, the former Lt. Governor of Massachusetts, and Graff, resident scholar at the Brandies Women’s Studies Research Center, explain that men are paid more for doing the same jobs as women. And education doesn’t make a difference.
Women with a college degree will earn $1.2 million less than their male friends sitting next to them at graduation. Think a degree from law school or medical school, or even working on an MBA will help? Those women will earn $2 million less than male colleagues.
“But everybody knows women get paid less than men,” said Cecil Adams in her Chicago Reader column “The Straight Dope.”
The question isn’t if women can get the same jobs as men, it’s if they can perform the job as well. When it comes to being paid for the same work, Adams said, “women, in some people's eyes, don't do the same work as men.”
While Arnold’s journey as head coach has shown that views regarding gender can be changed, it also illustrates that gender stereotypes in our society have remained the same.
A “female football coach is like a male nurse: a sin against nature,” a character from the popular television show Glee said in the show’s second season premier. Coincidentally, the show took a shot at addressing gender stereotypes with the introduction of its very own female football coach. Art mimics life through the character Shannon Beiste as we see how commonplace assumptions regarding gender make their way into pop culture and through our television screen.
When it comes to viewing women and men equally, or at least treating them as such, America still has a long way to go. Women may not like to hear it, but, even outside of football, we’re still living in a man’s world.
Send Jessica comments at jrstone3@asu.edu
