United States Naval Academy
Professor Acosta
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Argumentative Essay Women Should be Able to Compete on Men’s Teams According to the McKinsey Global Institute report, if women could play an identical role in labor markets to those of men, the global annual GDP (Gross Domestic Product) would rise as much as twenty six percent, or about twenty eight trillion dollars, by 2015. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Unfortunately, the World Economic Forum(WEF) estimates that it will take at least eighty years for women to achieve political, social and economic equality with men. This is nothing new. Women won the right to vote fifty-one years after African American males, and the United States ranked 60th in the 2015 Global Gender Gap report conducted …show more content…
What about when Mills College fencer Helene Mayer had her men’s championship title revoked in 1938 after holding it for only a day? “As is common in these cases, the women’s victories were belittled and overlooked, and the men they beat were excused for having gone lightly on them due to their looks or supposed ‘frailty’” writes authors Tamburrin and Tannsjo in their book Genetic Technology and Sport: Ethical Questions. When the U.S Women’s team won the Women’s World Cup, they took home a paycheck of $2 million while the U.S men’s team finished in 11th place with a payment of $9 million, and when Germany’s men’s team won the 2014 World Cup, $35 million was their prize. “For a WNBA player in the 2015 season, the minimum salary was $38,913, the maximum salary was $109,500, and the team salary cap in 2012 was $878,000. For NBA players in the 2015-2016 season, the minimum salary is $525,093, the maximum salary is $16.407 million, and the team salary cap is an all-time high of $70 million.” (Women's Sports Foundation). In fact, before Title Ⅸ (which prohibits discrimination on sex in any federally funded activity, including sports) was passed; even the funding for male and female teams differed …show more content…
At marathon distances, [which are] twenty-six miles, women can perform identically to men—and in Boston’s 2003 Marathon the mean running time for the top 207 runners showed women’s times to be nearly five minutes faster” (McDonagh and Pappano, Playing with the Boys; Why Separate is Not Equal). While estrogen does result in higher body fat levels, 8 percent compared to men's, greater body fat actually results in greater insulation and buoyancy in swimming and also reduces drag in the water, which is why women currently “hold the record for the twenty-two-mile open water swim from Catalina Island to California’s mainland.”(McDonagh and Pappano). With such conclusive evidence, women are still not allowed to compete in the 1500 meter swim, instead replacing it with the 800 meter on this basis they are “too delicate to swim long distances”, which is holding back some of the greatest female distance swimmers like Katie LeDecky. Even though weaker shoulder muscles and looser supporting tissues mean that women’s joints are less stable and so results in a higher rate of injury, medicine physician Bridget Quinn says “By proper training and strengthening of supporting muscles, women can prevent such