Inequalities in Girls’ High School Sports Participation: How Social Class, Race/Ethnicity, and Gender Route Opportunities to Play and Persist in Athletics

ABSTRACT

High school athletics are understudied sites for social and educational stratification. Participation can offer mental and physical health benefits, improved student retention and graduation rates, the encouragement of pro-social behaviors, resume building, and enhanced social statuses. Despite legal prohibitions against race and gender discrimination in schools, opportunities to play and persist in interscholastic athletics may reflect and amplify existing social and educational stratification processes. Using an exploratory sequential mixed-methods research design, this study centers on girls’ high school sports and considers how gender, race/ethnicity, and social class operate at the individual, interactional, cultural, and institutional levels and encourage proclivities, commitments, and support for participation. We combine qualitative (N = 28 women and 47 total college athletes) and quantitative (N = 4,271 high school students) studies to inquire about how, and to what extent, racial/ethnic and social-class dynamics affect girls playing any and specific high school sports and whether they play persistently. Findings suggest that schools co-construct unequal athletic opportunity structures by nurturing and rewarding a cultivated athletic habitus associated with masculinity, whiteness, and affluent dispositions. These processes disguise athletic advantages and successes as well-earned merit and restrict who is most likely to receive the individual and social benefits of high school sports participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Habitus
• whiteness
• social class
• segregation
• girls’ school sports

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kirsten Hextrum

Kirsten Hextrum is an assistant professor of language, culture, and society, graduate faculty in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and the coordinator of the College Student Services Administration Program at Oregon State University. Her research explores the reproduction and contestation of state power at the nexus of school, sports, and communities. Her book, Special Admission: How College Athletic Recruitment Favors White Suburban Athletes (Rutgers University Press, 2021) contradicts the national belief that college sports provide an avenue for upward mobility. Prior to becoming faculty, she worked in academic support services for college athletes and competed as a Division I athlete.

Chris Knoester

Chris Knoester is a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. He specializes in the sociology of family and of sport. He is a North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Research Fellow, the chair of research for the Ohio State Sports and Society Initiative, and the principal investigator of the National Sports and Society Survey. He has published nearly fifty peer-reviewed studies and his expertise has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, US News & World Report, and The Conversation.

James Tompsett

James Tompsett is a PhD candidate in sociology at The Ohio State University. His research interests include inequality, sociology of education, and sociology of sport. James also teaches Research Methods at Ohio State. His dissertation investigates vulnerability in higher education, and his published research findings have been featured in AP News, Times News UK, Yahoo News, MSN, St Louis Post Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, and The Conversation.