The Portrayal of Women in Sports Media
Why This Topic?
What initially made me want to thoose this is as my topics is related to an exercise that we did in class. What we did is we had a discussion about the gender roles in our society. Before this exercise, I never really gave gender roles any thought. After the class period, I realized that our society has a ver y influencial role in influencing us on the way we think we should act according to our gender. As I gave this more thought I realized that society tells us from a very early age that there is a set expectation of how females should behave and a set expection of how males should behave. I always thought that the way I behave and act was independent of any other influences besides those of the family. What I found out is that our society has much more influence on the way we portray ourselves and how we portray other people.
My Topic
After talking about gender roles in our society, I wanted to go deeper into this idea for my inquiry project. What immediately came to my mind was sports and how that is associated with gender. I then asked myself the question of how I think women are portrayed in sports. As I thought more about this topic, I realized that regardless of gender, the way men or women are perceived in sports depends on our media. Sports media plays an especially important role.
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What is the Importance?
I feel this is an important topic of discussion for seceral reasons. First of all, I think it is clear to almost anybody that women are not covered as much in sports media as men are. This does not take any hard core reasearch to figure out. It is almost too easy to see. If you walk into your local grocery store and look at the magazine section, you will see that ther is a difference in the way men and women are covered in sports. Almost every cover of every sports magazine will feature males. Maybe 2 or 3 out of 15 sports magazines will feature women on the cover. This trend is also easy to see on T.V. If you watch ESPN or any televized sports event, most of the time the athletes will be male. It is clear that there is a total unbalnced ammount of coverage between men and women in sports and I think it is important to find out the reason for this.
My Question
After thinking about my topic and considering all of the information I gathered, I just have one main question that I would like to answer. Why does the sports media give almost all of its coverage to men and so little to wome? This is a questions that I was not initially able to answer myself. I know there are thousands of female athletes who play sports in middles school. I know thousands more play at the collegiate level. There is also a large number of women who compete as professionals and this is easy to see when watching events such as the olympics.
Current Conversation on the Issue
I discovered the current conversation on this topic is not conistent with everyone. The conversation will vary depending on who you ask. I first asked people what they thought about this issue in the first place. I would ask family, friends, and both male and female athletes what kind of views they held. I later read news articels and watched interviews on this topic to see how this issue is thought of on a national level. The results were suprising to me.
First, I asked some of my frinds who were male athletes what thier opinions were about this topic. Many of my friends said they new many gifted and talented female athletes in thier age group, so primarily at thier respective colleges and universites. When I asked if my frinds knew any famous women athletes, the response was almost always no. The results were similar when I asked women athletes in college what they thought about this idea. Again, these female collegiate athletes knew many talented female athletes in either college or high school who would sometimes even compete on the international level. When I asked these female athletes if they could name for instance, any teams in the WMB or any famous women olympians, the answers was also usualy no.
In addition to interviewing people aobut this topic, I also wanted to get a sense of how this topic is being thought of on the national level. The truth is, almost nobody is talking about this topic in sports media, or any kind of media. The only people who seem to bee looking at this issue are a handful of women who were former athletes. These small group of women think that after careful analysis, ther is definately a gap of media coverage for male and women athletes and that this should be recognized as a problem that needs to be fixed.
Facts About Women Sports and Media Coverage
The following facts are concerning women's sports and the media coveragae associated with them derived from The Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport. For the most part, I did not know about these fact and womens sports coverage and to be honest, I was rather surprised. Here are some facts that I think anyone who has interest in womens sports, would want to konw.
1. In 1995, women received 5% of sports coverage.
2. in 2005, that number dropped to 2% of sports coverage.
3. 40% of all athletes are women
4. 43% of all college scholarships go to female athletes
5. There are only 12 teams in the WNBA compared the 30 in the NBA
6. In the U.S, there is only 1 professional hockey team
7. When women are portrayed in sports media, they are usually portayed of the court with the focus on looks more than performance.
What Experts Are Saying
Researchers from The Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sports have been studying the relationship between women athletes and sports media consistently for the past decade. Researchers have discovered that although there is little coverage in the media of women athletes, the popularity of watching female spors is rising. Studies have shown that if more women's athletic games such as from the WNBA, or collegiate sports were broadcasted, the revenue generated could exceed over 35 million dollars in the first year and consistently increase with each passing year. This kind of data should encourage sports media companies to give women;s sports more coverage.
My Conclusion
With all of my research considered, I have come to the final conclusion. This imbalance of coverage between male and female athletes is somthing that needs to begin to change. This lack of coverage does not only effect publicity, but it effects the income women will receive at the professional level. The more media coverage companies such as ESPN give women, the more money they will receive as professionals. Such low pay effects not only current athletes, but potential women athletes as well. It is likely that there are many skilled femal athletes who decide to to go pro because of the poor pay. What needs to be done is for these sports networks to increase the coverage. When the coverage oncreases, then the pay for these athletes will increase. Once pay begins to rise, then greater numbers of skilled female athletes will want to play these sports on professional level. Once the number of talanted athletes increase, there more interested audiences will become with watching games. Then, eventually, the media coverage of women's sports may be relatively close to the coverage of male athletes. The last point I would like to make is that women work just as hard and are jsut as dedicated in sports as males are on the high school, collegiate, and professional levels. Who should say that they deserve less coverage than males in any sport?
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