I don't think I would say I don't belong here; I do belong. I belong on the LPGA; I belong on the PGA. I think I belong in both.

14-year-old, ninth grader Michelle Wie, 2004 Sony Open in Hawaii

The efforts of the golf prodigy Michelle Wie while playing in men’s professional golf tournaments has led to an immense amount of comment from professional golfers, golf aficionados and the general public. The comments have encapsulated issues as diverse as tokenism, the pursuit of excellence, commercialism, notions of inferiority, discrimination, inter-gender competition and gender separation in a way few other contests have done. Why is this so? After all, the great Mildred “Babe” Didrikson played in three Professional Golfer’s Association (PGA) events in 1945, making the cut in Los Angeles, Tuscon and Phoenix. It seems that the same old stereotypes and arguments can be recycled after more than sixty years!

Why does inter-gender competition provoke so much argument? At a recreational level there are any number of mixed teams playing a range of sports, with men and women of modest ability playing netball, basketball, soccer and volleyball every weekend in Australia. Whenever a road race occurs it’s common for men and women to run the same course at the same time and many female runners will outperform their male counterparts. Children play sports in relative equality until their early teens, even traditionally physical and aggressive sports such as Australian Rules Football. In combat sports such as karate, tae kwon do and judo more highly qualified women will lead classes and teach men how to fight. Is it only when participants move from recreational to competitive programs where large sums of money are involved and egos are challenged that attitudes change?

In western society, women who competed in sports at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century were truly pioneering. They were considered so physically inferior to men that patriarchal officialdom denied them numerous opportunities. These attitudes were often reinforced by medical and religious opinion. After the women’s 800 metres running event at the 1928 Olympic Games the executive committee of the International Amateur Athletics Federation actually banned races of more than a half lap at the Games. In 1931 Baseball Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned women from professional baseball after 17-year-old pitcher Virne Beatrice "Jackie" Mitchell struck out the legendary Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game for the Chattanooga Lookouts. Landis voided Mitchell's contract on the basis that baseball was "too strenuous" for women. While these attitudes seem ludicrous today, there were already many examples of women performing major feats of endurance in that era. When making their decisions I doubt these officials even considered the fact that Trudy Ederle and Clemington Corson had swum the English Channel in 1926 in times that bettered the men who had performed that feat.

The pursuit of excellence and lack of opportunity are still major reasons why women compete in competitions that are set up for men. It is obvious to anyone who looks at sports around the world that the funding provided by government and commercial sponsors overwhelming favours men’s competitions, providing facilities and coaching resources that are simply not available for many women. Melissa Barbieri, the Matildas goalkeeper, recently turned out for the Richmond Eagles reserves team in the Victorian Premier League competition as she needed high quality competition leading into the Women’s World Cup this year. Her case is not an isolated one, especially in regional areas.

In very few sports are women supported financially on even terms with men. Tennis is one of the few sports where sponsors, crowds and dollars flow to female athletes. Yet tennis was host to the most famous of all the “battles of the sexes” when Billie Jean King and Bobbie Riggs stepped out to play each other on 20 September 1973 in Houston, Texas. Thirty thousand in the stadium and another fifty million on television saw a game that firmly connected women's rights to women's sports and kick-started equal treatment and equal pay in that particular sport, especially as King beat the equally outspoken, former US Open Champion Riggs.

While promoters of that particular event could not foresee the development of an independent women’s tennis circuit that heavily advertises its popular stars, it did show that there is money to be made from women’s sport. Unfortunately in many countries the will to build the infrastructure and provide the opportunity and promotion for women is lacking. One only has to be reminded that women are not allowed to even attend football matches in Iran to see how entrenched some religious, social and political attitudes are, especially when compared to the boom in women’s football in North America, East Asia and Europe.

Even today it is strange that opportunities, when they are provided, often take a strange, unequal form. One example of this is the great softball-baseball divide. The United States of America has always been a country where the struggle for equality between men and women has a long history and where baseball is one of that nation’s greatest cultural heritages. The great anthem Take Me Out to the Ball Game is written about a young girl's love of the sport and until the 1930s hundreds of teams provided opportunities for those who could hit, catch and slide. It’s puzzling therefore that women don’t play baseball to the same extent as men do in the United States, they play softball instead. This has translated to other countries and even at the Olympic Games men play baseball and women softball. The cultural constructions that make it acceptable for women to play softball and be given opportunities in that sport rather than baseball are puzzling. There are obvious parallels with the same sorts of social and historical constraints that regularly funnel women into “acceptable” workplaces in the wider community. Being given opportunities in a traditional women’s sport is not a substitute for equality in all sports. Acceptable women’s sports often receive less support than they deserve, just as traditional women’s jobs are often paid less than they deserve.

At an elite level, there are some sports where men and women do compete against each other for the same prizes. Gold medal winning teams at Olympic equestrian events contain athletes of both sexes, yachting and motor sports also leap over the gender bar and unique events like the Iditarod sled race have winners from both sexes. In the majority of these sports the difference in physiology is not a determining factor and other athletic aspects such as skill, instinct for the sport and the will to achieve are more important. Perhaps it’s not surprising that sports where both sexes compete on equal terms tend to avoid the sniggering condemnation of the male athletes involved.

A healthy community is one where there is equal support for the involvement of women in sport at a recreational and elite level. In many cases playing in the same teams is the desirable outcome, especially when the aim is mass participation or the social benefits of playing team sports as a child. In cases where physiology would deny equal opportunity then there must be support for women’s teams at all levels. Individual women who have developed their sporting ability to levels of national or international excellence must also be given the opportunity to achieve their full potential. To borrow a phrase from Field of Dreams “build it and they will come” and maybe then people will not get overly excited when Michelle Wie steps up to the tee.