Overview

Statement of the Problem
Both student-athletes at North Olmsted High School, we thought that incorporating this similarity would make for unique research. Also, we both support the equality amongst genders, so we believed incorporating gender equality with athletics in research may have already been observed, but we could also add our own data as well. We found conducting this research would be a fun topic to explore and realize how gender equal in sports North Olmsted High School really is. However, to expand this idea, we wanted to relate gender equality between seasons. We decided to expand our research by dividing it into athletic seasons (fall, winter, spring) because we both participate in the fall and winter sport seasons, and were curious to see if we, as females, we as equally represented among our male varsity counterparts. To do this, we also had to see if females had the same athletic opportunities as males, meaning if there were the same amount of sports for boys and girls per season. Overall, we are trying to show if North Olmsted High School is as gender equal in athletics as the community thinks and if our statistics surpass or lag behind the national data.

Abstract

We did a study on the association between gender and the number of varsity athletes per season.  To do this we obtained rosters with numbers for each sport for each season (fall,winter,spring). We then, separated each season by males and females to determine if the gender affected the varsity sport per season. Afterwards, we took these numbers and made a summary of the data in a more simplified chart with just the athletes who obtained varsity letters, still separated by boys, girls and season. To determine if an athlete was a varsity member, we gathered each sport roster, which are typically submitted before the formal season. Therefore, the athlete had to be recognized by their coach during the offseason or the very beginning of the season to be qualified as a varsity member. To determine the association between athlete who received or obtained a varsity letter per season, then separated by gender, we ran a chi-square test on the data.  On a 95% confidence interval we determined that there was a significant association between the two because the p value of 0.016 was less than our level of significance at 0.05. Therefore, since we were able to reject our null hypothesis, we were able to determine that we had enough sufficient evidence conclude our study.