Getting Girls Into the Game
How one member of the senior class is pushing for gender equity in the world of sport
Participating in sports can change young lives for the better—but only if those young people are able to get involved and stay involved. “I’ve seen the statistic that girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys by age 14,” says Alannah Scardino ’21, a student of sport management and social thought and political economy at the Isenberg School of Management and a proud advocate of using sport for social change.
“They drop out for a variety of reasons,” says Scardino, “from a lack of safety, transportation, or role models, from social stigma, the quality of the experience, those kinds of factors. So one thing I have done to address that is taking any opportunity I can, whether it’s with a school assignment or an internship, to target those reasons in order to help advance youth in sports.”
Since high school, Scardino has worked against the grain of social norms to advance female participation in male-dominated spaces. “As a kid I was put in so many sports by my parents,” says Scardino, who was most drawn to soccer and horseback riding. “Throughout the adversities I faced in my childhood, if I didn’t have that base of sport with me, I think that there’s no way I would be the person that I am today.”
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