Concept
The participation of women and girls in sports, physical fitness and exercise, has been recorded to have existed throughout history. However, participation rates and activities vary in accordance with nation, era, geography, and stage of economic development. While initially occurring informally, the modern era of organized sports did not begin to emerge either for men or women until the late industrial age. Until roughly 1870, women's activities tended to be informal and recreational in nature, lacked rules codes, and emphasized physical activity rather than competition. Today, women's sports are more sport-specific and have developed into both amateur levels of sport and professional levels in various places internationally, but is found primarily within developed countries where conscious organization and accumulation of wealth has occurred. In the mid-to-latter part of the 20th century, female participation in sport and the popularization of their involvement increased, particularly during its last quarter. Very few organized sports have been invented by women. Sports such as Newcomb ball, netball, acrobatic gymnastics and tumbling, and possibly stoolball, are examples. More recent examples include Pamela Frey's sport of BasKua in Argentina, and the game of Crokicurl by Liz Wreford and Leanne Muir in Canada. Women's involvement in sports is more visible in well-developed countries and today their level of participation and performance still varies greatly by country and by sport. Despite an increase in women's participation in sport, the male demographic is still the larger of the two. These demographic differences are observed globally. Female dominated sports are the one exception. Girls' participation in sports tend to be higher in the United States than in other parts of the world like Western Europe and Latin America. Girls' participation in more violent contact sports is far less than that of their male counterparts. Two important divisions exist in relation to female sporting categories.
