Travel Equity for College Teams

Later, in 1985, three Iowa State runners died when their seven-seat plane dropped into a tree-lined neighborhood in Des Moines. For many years, the Iowa women's basketball team was entrusted to similar tiny aircraft. The Hawkeye women flew to road games in a caravan of four planes, none of them larger than a nine-seater -- some of them without co-pilots. Players and coaches envied the men's team, which the school provided with larger, more powerful charters. Planes big enough to hold the whole team and even give many of the players their own rows to stretch out. "If gender equity is important anywhere, it should be in the area (of safety)," said Angie Lee, who resigned last year as Hawkeyes coach after five seasons. "That was tough for kids to swallow -- why we didn't get to fly on the same planes as the men." Equity is no longer an issue at Iowa. In an attempt to address an obvious imbalance, the Hawkeye women this season began using the same national charter broker as the men's team. They draw from the same fleet of 44- and 50-seat charters.

In this article the women's basketball team weren't given the same travel opportunities as the men and so their safety was being compromised. When he women's team began seeing that the men were riding in more larger and better airplanes and the women were riding in smaller ot so good airplanes, they realized that there was an injustice against their gender.

This shows that still in recent years women's sports are still second and seen as second class to the men in sports simply because of the ideology that society and some men have about women playing sports. So unless there is some kind of acion in trying to gain equal opportunity for women playing sports it will still be the same for women.

Link: http://www.makeithappen.com/wis/readings/travel.html