Amplify: The world is changing, and the names we use for women’s sports probably should, too

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Carol Toller is an editor at The Globe and Mail.

It hit me last week, while I was writing what we call a “sell” for The Globe’s Saturday front page. A sell is a few short, snappy words that promote a story inside that day’s paper, and I was trying to write one about our national men’s soccer team and its sudden, jaw-dropping success in global tournaments.

“After 37 years, Canada’s men’s soccer team earns a place in the World Cup.” That’s what I wanted to write, though it depended on them winning a key game against Costa Rica. But damn it, the sell was too long. Not by much, but if I could lose a word or a few characters I’d make our A1 designer happy.

I like our designer, so I tried, and as I looked for something to cut, I wondered, Do I need to say “men’s”? It’s the World Cup, after all, a global event followed avidly by fans of (men’s) soccer everywhere. Surely that nod to the players’ testosterone levels was redundant.

And that’s the thing that’s bugged me ever since. When we talk about sports, we often talk about them in a silently gendered way. When we say Hockey Night in Canada, we mean men’s hockey. When we talk about major league baseball, we’re talking about men’s teams. When it’s female athletes we’re referring to, we slide in the gender signifier: The women’s [insert your favourite sport here] team. You know, the other one. The one that isn’t the default. As for non-binary people, they’re left out of the mix entirely.

Sports leagues and associations have typically taken the same gendered approach. The National Basketball Association is for men, so it doesn’t need to say that. The Women’s National Basketball Association is for women, so it does.

As I was mulling all this, feeling myself getting angrier, I came across a new campaign by the YWCA. In partnership with Canadian soccer star Christine Sinclair and a handful of female sports media personalities, the YWCA is calling on the major men’s sports leagues (NHL, NBA, MLS, PGA) to “Add the M” to their logos (and they’ve actually done the design work for them). You can watch a video describing the campaign here.

It’s a simple idea with a powerful message: Men’s sports and women’s sports should be treated the same way. When we have to add “women’s” but not “men’s” to a title, the gender tag becomes a sad qualifier, a quiet nod to being not-the-norm. Second best.

So why not flip the script and add the word “men’s” when we’re writing about a men’s sport? Considering how compelling women’s sports have become – think about powerhouse athletes like Sinclair, who has scored more international goals for her country (188) than any other player in the world, or hockey megastar Hayley Wickenheiser – it only makes sense to give female athletes equal treatment.

Calling on everyone to acknowledge gender is one way to address the existing inequity. But gender labels often come with complicated baggage (it’s still common to see women’s teams with names like “Lady Rangers” or “Lady Generals”) and they assume a binary perspective. Another, more inclusive, approach is to strip away gender labels entirely, like the National Women’s Hockey League did last fall, when it changed its name to the Premier Hockey Federation. The idea of the rebrand is to recognize players for their athletic talent, not their gender. It sends a clear message to transgender and nonbinary athletes, too, that they’re welcome in the PHF – and so are nonbinary fans. Meanwhile, the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association, the bigger, arguably more influential women’s league, remains staunchly gendered (by name, at least).

The PHF’s approach seems to point the way forward, as the world becomes more gender fluid and less intent on reductive binary divisions. Transgender athletes like Lia Thomas, a high-profile U.S. college-level swimmer, are starting a whole new conversation about gender in sport – one that goes beyond names and titles and enters into the thorny issue of who they should be competing against. The world’s changing, and names probably should too. (With all due respect to the YWCA and its campaign, when I work out, I don’t think about whether it’s YM or YW. I just go to the Y.) But I wasn’t sure how to apply this thinking to the sell I had to write last week, about a gendered national soccer team.

In the end, we had to completely rewrite it. An unexpected loss to Costa Rica meant the men’s team didn’t qualify for the World Cup in time for last Saturday’s paper. So we wrote a different one instead, about what makes the team special.

We called it the “Canadian men’s team.” For now, at least, that feels right.

What else we’re thinking about:

This gorgeous short story in the April 4 issue of The New Yorker by Ukrainian writer Artem Chapeye helped me see his country through the eyes of the people there. It’s beautiful and melancholic but also full of wonderful dark humour – there’s a great running gag that pokes fun at North Americans’ habit of inserting “the” in front of the name “Ukraine.” I’ve also just started listening to the audiobook version of Say Nothing, the true story of a mother of 10 who was murdered in 1972 during the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. It’s a spectacular piece of journalism by Patrick Radden Keefe that reads like a novel.

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