20 funny moments of women at sports

The participation of women and girls in sports, physical fitness and exercise, has been recorded to have existed throughout history. However, participation rates and activities vary in accordance with nation, era, geography, and stage of economic development. While initially occurring informally, the modern era of organized sports did not begin to emerge either for men or women until the late industrial age.

Until roughly 1870, women's activities tended to be informal and recreational in nature, lacked rules codes, and emphasized physical activity rather than competition.[1] Today, women's sports are more sport-specific and have developed into both amateur levels of sport and professional levels in various places internationally, but is found primarily within developed countries where conscious organization and accumulation of wealth has occurred. In the mid-to-latter part of the 20th century, female participation in sport and the popularization of their involvement increased, particularly during its last quarter. Very few organized sports have been invented by women. Sports such as Newcomb ball, netball, acrobatic gymnastics and tumbling,[2] and possibly stoolball, are examples. More recent examples include Pamela Frey's sport of BasKua in Argentina,[3][4][5] and the game of Crokicurl by Liz Wreford and Leanne Muir in Canada.

Sports involvement by women is more observable in well-developed countries and is often attributed to the presence of gender parity feminism, a feminist ideology popularized in the United States of America.[6] Today the level of participation and performance still varies greatly by country and by sport. Despite an increase in women's participation in sport, the male demographic is still the larger of the two.[citation needed] These demographic differences are observed globally. Female dominated sports are the one exception. Girls' participation in sports tend to be higher in the United States than in other parts of the world like Western Europe and Latin America.[7] Girls' participation in more violent contact sports is far less than that of their male counterparts.

Argentine field hockey player Luciana Aymar
Two important divisions exist in relation to female sporting categories. These sports either emerged exclusively as an organized female sport or were developed as an organized female variant of a sport first popularized by a male demographic and therefore became a female category. In all but a few exceptional cases, such as in the case of camogie, a female variant, or "women's game" uses the same name of the sport popularly played by men, but is classified into a different category which is differentiated by sex: men's or women's, or girls or boys. Female variants are widely common while organized female sports by comparison are rare and include team sports such as netball, throwball, artistic (née synchronized) swimming,[8] and ringette. In female sports, the supposed benefits of gender parity, gender equity, and gender equality feminism are controversial. Men dominate the top elite spots in the vast majority of sports worldwide due to their biological advantages[9][10][11] and the deliberate exclusion of male athletes prevents male participants from dominating for that reason. The conscious exclusion of male athletes from female sports has enabled them to produce an elite level of female athletes rather than male. In addition, female sports provide women and girls with a unique advantage by affording them the opportunity to feature as the sport's primary athletes rather than have to compete with males for attention, an achievement undermined by the inclusion of males.[12] The Canadian sport of ringette, created in 1963, is the last team sport in history to have been created exclusively for the female sex.

Today, female sports which have not yet become Olympic sports are blocked from IOC acceptance due to the fact that they must meet the IOC's gender parity quotas. Because the large majority of organized sports are first developed by and played predominantly by males, IOC gender parity strictly favours female variants despite their inability to pioneer an original sports model. Female sports by comparison face direct discrimination from the IOC due to the fact that female sports have a predominately female athlete base. As a result, they face IOC rejection regardless of their numbers because they are considered to be inadequate due to their female oriented programs, meaning they "do not have enough men", despite men dominating organized sports internationally. The IOC's Olympic Charter currently rejects any sport that isn't widely practiced by men in at least 75 countries and on 4 continents, and by women in 40 countries and on 3 continents. Due to the IOC's gender parity quotas, sports with a predominately male participation rate rather than female are automatically given priority status by the IOC. In addition, the Charter puts pressure on female sports federations to campaign for the inclusion of more male players rather than female,[13] incentivizes male participation opportunities rather than female,[14] and shuts female dominated sports like netball out.

Except in a few rare cases like women's professional tennis, professional women's sport rarely provide competitors with a livable income. In addition, competing for media coverage of the women's variant of a sport which is primarily popular among males, creates complex barriers. More recently, there has been an increasing amount of interest, research, investment and production in regards to equipment design for female athletes. Interest and research involving the identification of sex-specific injuries, particularly though not exclusively among high performance female athletes, has increased as well, such as in the case of concussions[15][16][17] and the female athlete triad, a.k.a. "Relative energy deficiency in sport", (RED-S).[18][19]

At times female athletes have engaged in social activism in conjunction with their participation in sport. Protest methods have included playing strikes, social media campaigns, and in the case of America, federal lawsuits on grounds of inequality, usually as it relates to gender parity principles, American law and Title IX. Public service oriented promotional campaigns for girls in sport involve a variety of media campaign styles.[20]