After hearing of certain rules and regulations for St. Edward’s University intramural soccer and investigating further, I believe society has not advanced as far as it should have in terms of gender equality.

Intramural soccer games for the 2011 season at St. Edward’s started March 22. There are two leagues — a men’s league and a co-ed league.

Intramural sports are great for people who play for the love of the game and want to compete against other teams without having to be a part of a varsity school team.

As a competitive person with a busy schedule, I’m 100 percent behind the idea of being able to play different sports and have a good time without being weighed down by the responsibilities and hectic schedules of varsity teams. However, I find some things about the current intramural set-up questionable.

In addition to the option for an all-female league being completely absent, there are some differences between the rules of men’s and co-ed soccer that I find unsettling.

One of the rules of the co-ed league is that there must be two females playing at all times. Sophomore Shelby Cole answered some of my questions about the co-ed league rules.

“I swear if they didn’t regulate these rules, all the games would look like men’s indoor games with girls on the sidelines,” Cole said.

The other rule that is different between the men’s and co-ed leagues is that for every goal that is scored by a woman, that team earns two points instead of the regular one point earned for every goal scored by a man.

“Guys are just typically a lot faster and more aggressive than the girls,” Cole said. “The ‘girl rules’ encourage the guys on your team to incorporate you in the game…[so it’s] not just…two dudes scoring all the time while the girls watch in the background.”

While I acknowledge that encouraging team unity is a positive thing, and that-statistically men are faster than women, in my experience that does not mean that women are always less aggressive than men. While Cole said that she approved of the girl-goal rules because they “force the team to work as a unit,” I’m not sure that the rules are doing what they set out to.

The fact that such rules have to exist to “regulate” female involvement in a sport shows that society still has not come far enough in the fight for gender equality.

Encouraging equal involvement with the rule that requires two women on the court is fine, but the fact remains that equal involvement should be a given, not something that has to be regulated. It should be a standard — not an afterthought.

The two-point goal rule seems fine on the surface. You may find yourself thinking, “Awesome, now when those girls score all those goals, the team will get a whole bunch of points.” But the fact is that the rule seems to exist because women are not expected to score as many goals as the men.

And while it’s entirely possible that the women will indeed score fewer goals, this kind of negative connotation at the outset does more harm to the image of women in sports than it does to benefit the scoreboard or the competitiveness of the game.