Trinity College Women’s Athletic League Leads Effort to Earn Greater Gender Equality for Women Athletes

Bylthe Hastings ’23

Sports Editor

In a continuation of the subject on campus about the inequality of the new stadium project, and between men’s and women’s facilities in general, the women athletes on campus have created the Trinity Women’s Athletic League (TWAL). TrinWAL recently created an online petition to draw attention to the disparity between men’s and women’s athletics on the Trinity College campus. TrinWAL also hopes to inspire women athletes on other campuses to start petitions to create change as well.

With over 1,700 signatures on the petition, TrinWAL hopes to grab the administration’s attention with this important issue. TrinWAL celebrates the new stadium, which fields teams like football and men’s lacrosse, and is excited for the opportunities it creates for the male athletes. They are asking for the same in return. A statement released by TrinWAL on their Instagram page said, “On Friday, September 24th, women athletes at Trinity College gathered to unify and recognize the disparities that women athletes are experiencing. Concluding that meeting, we have decided to create TrinWAL, a coalition of representatives from every women’s athletic team at Trinity. We see and live the disparity and ask for your help with creating parity…The recent [field hockey] stadium construction left female athletes feeling subpar and is just a symbol of schoolwide observations regarding gender inequities in sports on Trinity College’s campus…The purpose of gathering your signatures is to show our administration and athletic departments that we will no longer stand idle and will actively hold the college accountable for complying with Title IX. We hope to gather equal amounts of signatures from men and women as this is a movement for all. Please show your support for and join us in our fight to stop gender inequality in athletics at Trinity College.”

Donations to Trinity College work in a pool system, and therefore skew the amount of money going to different athletics on campus. Money cannot be directly donated to the renovation of the field hockey, for example, but goes to athletics as a whole. With higher demands for funding for larger teams, which is unequal due to the roster sizes of men’s versus women’s sports, athletic donations, a majority of the time, end up going towards men’s needs. Without a further change of the athletic fields, TrinWAL will continue to take steps to uncover the truth on campus about gender inequality and to show how addition of funding to one sport, doesn’t negate the subtraction from another.