Ambiguity in Hackley Policy Can Lead to Gender Bias
Credit: Francesca Docters
Senior Sammy Mueller swelters with her shirt on in the August heat.
September 21, 2015
After baking for hours under the hot August sun, Hackley’s female athletes were told that they couldn’t remove their shirts in an effort to cool down – even as they could see male athletes practicing shirtless just a few fields over. This dichotomy is unacceptable: While a ban on shirtlessness during athletics deserves plenty of healthy debate and discourse in the community, it is certain that, before students are told to put a shirt on during practice, an unambiguous rule regarding shirtlessness during athletic activity needs to be established.
According to both Upper School Director Andy King and Athletic Director Jason Edwards, there are no official written dress rules or restrictions for athletics at Hackley. Instead, individual coaches and teachers are left to decide what constitutes as appropriate athletic dress. Evidently, their opinions differ: shirtless athletes can be found at nearly every preseason boys’ soccer or cross country practice, for example, but field hockey players are generally forbidden from shedding their tops.
While this fact does not necessarily insinuate unfairness, the current situation does at the very least arouse some suspicion about implicit gender bias. For one reason or another, it is oftentimes male athletes that are permitted to play and leave practice shirtless, and the female ones who are told to cover up.
This doesn’t imply that all coaches believe that girls shouldn’t be allowed to practice shirtless while boys should. English teacher and field hockey coach Jenny Leffler, for example, remarked that while she doesn’t allow her athletes to play shirtless, it “definitely bothers her when she sees boys being allowed to play shirtless.” To her and many others, the solution to the situation isn’t to have different rules for boys and girls; it is to make every athlete wear a shirt during practice.
While such a complete ban on shirtlessness is likely both impractical and unnecessary (any athlete will attest to how uncomfortable it is to stay in a sweat-soaked shirt for hours, and the need for body modesty amongst small, largely single-sex teams is far less than the need for it during school hours), the largest and most significant issue is the lack of a clearly defined policy for all coaches to follow and enforce. Without such a policy, all decision-making agencies on the matter will remain in the hands of individual teachers who have varied opinions, leaving students to be treated differently based simply on what sport they play – and, coincidentally or not, sometimes on their gender. To quash any suspicions of implicit gender bias against female athletes, the school must create a policy that ignores gender and is the same for all students.
Luckily, Hackley seems to be on its way to doing so. Mr. King said that while he “would prefer everyone kept their shirts on,” he would be happy to meet down with the deans and all coaches about what would be best practice regarding shirtlessness in sports going forward. Ensuring that student representatives, whether they be from community council or athletic teams, are involved in these administrative meetings is both an easy and important step the administration should take to insure that student voice is heard on a policy that would affect students almost exclusively.
Hopefully, after experiencing the late August heat, listening to student opinion, and considering that a little bit of midriff exposure for two weeks before the school year even begins during a team’s generally spectator-free preseason isn’t going to kill anybody, Hackley will allow all students to practice shirtless. If not, however, the school should at least provide some gender-neutral policy on the issue that ensures that all student-athletes are on equal footing.