New report on gender in televised sports

posted by One Sport Voice
Wednesday, June 2, 2010 at 7:00pm EDT

Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi: This blog reflects my critical eye and voice on all things sport. I am a critical thinker, scholar, and researcher in girls & women in sport, youth sport, and coach & sport parent education.

Two colleagues, Mike Messner (USC) and Cheryl Cooky (Purdue), just finished the latest installment of a longitudinal study GENDER IN TELEVISED SPORTS: NEWS AND HIGHLIGHTS SHOWS, 1989-2009. The report can downloaded for free here.

The results are depressing in regards to coverage of female athletes and given the results, you would think we are still watching sports on the TV pictured here.

Here are some highlights of the report:

Of the three network affiliates sampled in the study, men’s sports received 96.3% of the airtime, women’s sports 1.6%, and gender neutral topics 2.1%. This is a precipitous decline in the coverage of women’s sports since 2004, when 6.3% of the airtime was devoted to women’s sports, and the lowest proportion ever recorded in this study.
100% of the SportsCenter programs and 100% of the sports news shows in the sample led with a men’s sports story.
Good news? Past studies observed that women athletes (and women spectators) were frequently portrayed in demeaning ways—as sexual objects, or as the brunt of commentators’ sarcastic humor in stories on marginal pseudo‐sports. There was far less of this sort of sexist humor about women in 2009, though this may in part reflect that women in any form were increasingly absent from the broadcasts.

With female sport participation at record levels, these results are confounding… but for those who study gender and sports, probably not surprising. I encourage you to read the report and see the graphs for yourself.

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Lack of Women`s Sports Coverage

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