If tackle football isn't safe for girls, why let boys play?

AS SUMMER turns to fall, roughly 1.2 million U.S. teens are suiting up to play high school football. But something is shifting in this annual autumn rite. Tens of thousands of those young athletes are now girls, and they won't be donning shoulder pads or helmets because they're not playing tackle football.

- MICHAEL A. MESSNER

GIRLS' sports have long been adapted to protect the "weaker sex."

"All eyes are on flag football as the next emerging sport" for girls, according to Karissa Niehoff of the National Federation of High Schools. By 2024, Niehoff noted, 11 states (including California) had sanctioned flag football competition for high school girls, while 17 others had launched pilot programs. Given how girls are now flocking to the sport, it’s a sure bet that more states will be stampeding to offer flag football for girls.

The explosion of enthusiasm for girls' flag football has led some to wonder why girls don’t play tackle football, like the boys? As a scholar who has studied gender and sports since the 1980s, I am interested in how girls’ and boys’ sports have developed historically along parallel but distinct tracks, and what the similarities and differences in girls’ and boys’ sports tell us about our current gender relations and beliefs.

The simple answer to why most high school girls are channeled into flag football seems to be that people see tackle football as too violent and too dangerous for girls. But it’s not just girls’ football that gets special treatment: There is a long history whereby the rules of girls’ and women’s sports have been adapted and constrained to accommodate girls’ and women’s supposed physical limitations. Boys play baseball; girls play softball (despite a deep history of girls’ and women’s baseball). And as the game of lacrosse has expanded in American high schools in recent years, the boys’ full-contact game requires players to don helmets and protective equipment on their hands, arms and shoulders, while girls, shielded by rules that limit contact, wear only eye guards and protective mouthpieces.