Gender Stereotypes In Sport Essay

The sport domain has been traditionally considered an exclusive masculine field. Historically, women could not take part in sport until 1900 and they were allowed to join sports that did not provide physical contact or strain. Nowadays, although females can take part in every sport activity, gender stereotypes in sport still exist (Friedricks & Eccles, 2005). The persistence of gender stereotypes in sport could determine a phenomenon known as stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson, 1995; Steele, 1997; Steele, Spencer & Aronson, 2002). Stereotype threat consists in a suboptimal performance within a task related to a judgment dimension along which that particular social group is “known” to be “weak”. Moreover, this phenomenon occurs any time people

According to the author, when people think about a category of things, they think more frequently about the prototype of that category. Thus prototypes are “the clearest cases of category membership defined operationally by people’s judgments of goodness of membership in the category” (Rosch, 1999, p. 259). For this reason, pilot study 1 will be a cross-cultural study and will survey the typicality of a series of sensorimotor activities in relation to the category

Following Rosch’s indications (1975), a rate of 1 will indicate that the activity would be a very good example of people’s idea of sport, while a rate of 7 will indicate that the activity would fit very poorly with their idea of sport. The questionnaire will be translated into different languages (Italian, Lithuanian, English, French, Deutsch, Spanish). Data will offer an overview of what activity is more typically considered “sport” and what is not and this results will be employed in the Pilot Study