Boring women’s soccer? – If you cut up the men and women, they suddenly play pretty well – news

Morgan or Modric – the main thing is football

In the experiment, 613 study participants watched goal scenes of top soccer players such as Alex Morgan from the USA and Luka Modric from Croatia.

In one group, the gender of the players was blurred so that the participants could not tell if they were seeing men or women. In the control group, the videos were not altered.

Participants watched five men’s and five women’s videos and rated the players’ performance on a 5-point scale. The result: female soccer players were suddenly able to keep up with the men.

Boring, slow, unattractive: For too long, women’s sports have struggled with public perception. According to the study, such sexist ideas are less widely accepted today than they were in the past. But they are still adamant.

Accordingly, women’s abilities in sports – as well as in male-dominated professions – continue to come under scrutiny. According to the study, lower media attention compared to men’s soccer fuels prejudices, as does disproportionately smaller economic investment.

Fight for the cup – and for recognition

“The conventional wisdom is that men’s sports are better than women’s sports because they are bigger, stronger and faster,” explains Carlos Gomez, a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Business Administration and an author of the study. “However, the presence of stereotypes should alert us to another possibility: information about gender can influence our perception of quality.”

For Gomez, the result also disproves a widely held assumption: women’s soccer attracts less public interest because the quality is inferior to men’s soccer. “Down Under” not only football players are fighting for the world championship title, but also against many prejudices.