Gender Essentialism and U.S. Attitudes Towards the Media Coverage of Women’s Sport

Travers

Female eligibility policies punish people for gender nonconformity and normalize patriarchal rule. These policies were used first to exclude women deemed “too masculine” from competing against women who more closely conform to gender stereotypes. In recent years, this form of discipline has dovetailed with efforts to determine the circumstances, if any, under which transgender women may compete against cisgender women. Modern sport, as a set of institutions, does not stand apart from capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. In this article, I use a prison abolitionist lens to connect anti-trans campaigns and female eligibility policies that police sporting identity to the carceral logics of racial capitalism to make the argument that sex surveillance is related to race, social control, and capital accumulation.

Pope S., Allison R., Petty K.

This article offers an original contribution by examining both the quantity and quality of English print media coverage of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup and how fans perceive and respond to this coverage. It is the first longitudinal analysis of media coverage of women’s football in the United Kingdom and compares print media coverage between the 2015 and 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cups. We draw on a content analysis of five English national newspapers and 49 semistructured interviews with fans. We develop new theoretical insights through the development of our framework of the “next stage” of the “new age.” Our findings show media coverage of women’s football has substantially increased, with respectful coverage sustained. The new theme of gender equality made visible several types of inequality, but the media industry failed to acknowledge its own role in reinforcing gender inequalities. Interviewees were critical of the time-limited “revolution” whereby coverage was limited to the duration of the World Cup. To advance gender equality, future media coverage must be sustained, meaningful, and prominent.

Guyot R., Ohl F., Schoch L.

This study examines journalists’ working experiences to understand how they hinder the recognition of female footballers’ performances. It relies on 16 semi-structured interviews with Swiss sports journalists on Swiss French-speaking television. Guided by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, the study shows that advancements in the recognition of women’s football are promoted by a combination of external actors’ economic and political powers, while hindrances arise from internal factors within sports journalism. The embodied norms, routines and professional practices of journalists – that define performance as physical capital and naturalize hierarchies between women’s and men’s football – are disrupted by the credit (i.e. symbolic capital) given to women’s football by the Swiss football league and sponsors for political and economic reasons. This specific case of football enhances our understanding of the cultural and social factors that hinder the recognition and appreciation of performances by women in sports. Further, the study largely highlights how texts and their symbolic power are embedded in the social conditions of information production.

Goorevich A., LaVoi N.M.

Brown K.A., Jackson J.R., Quick M., Harrison V.R.

When considering that athletes are becoming more vocal about their beliefs related to social justice initiatives, the role of an athlete’s gender could have an impact on how sports fans view that athlete. When deciding to support or oppose a corporate social advocacy initiative, it can be argued that an individual’s perception of an athlete’s or team’s stance towards social justice can be influenced by elements of one’s social identity. Therefore, the current study expands on this idea by exploring how gender affects the perception of the credibility of an athlete as an endorser of CSA initiatives, considering both the gender of the participant and the gender of the athlete. Using both NBA and WNBA athletes, this experiment manipulates a league CSA initiative and players’ endorsements of the initiative to determine if (a) the participant’s reported gender and (b) the athlete’s gender will impact the perception of the athlete’s credibility. Results provided evidence that gender plays a significant role in that evaluation, such that the NBA player was perceived as more credible regardless of respondent gender, and while female respondents recorded no difference, male participants perceived the NBA player as more credible than his WNBA counterpart.

Scovel S.

Martínez-Corcuera R., Ginesta X., Frigola-Reig J.

This research focuses on the audiovisual broadcasts of the UEFA Women’s Champions League final won by FC Barcelona in 2021. The primary aim of this study is to analyze Spanish media discourses with three specific objectives: to determine the presence or absence of sexism; to identify alternative narratives that may emerge in the broadcasts; and to evaluate whether sports media normalizes these narratives or generates more subtle forms of sexism in the representation of women in football. Sports broadcasting often features sensationalist narratives that can escalate to sexist speech, configured as hate speech, inciting different degrees of aggression or violence. This condition diminishes the potential of sports as a space for coexistence. This article presents a qualitative and quantitative thematic analysis. Following Fuller (2006), Hesse-Biber (2017), and Martínez-Corcuera et al. (2022), we applied coding techniques to examine content related to the representation and participation of women in football. Conclusion reveals a minimal presence of discourses that belittle or marginalize female football players, although multiple alternative narratives that demand equality and recognition are also observed. These findings are consistent with numerous European studies that recognize women's football, although bias against female athletes compared to their male counterparts still persists.

Gomez-Gonzalez C., Dietl H., Berri D., Nesseler C.

Coche R., Bell T.R.

The FIFA Women’s World Cup was a steeple of professional sport in the summers of 2015 and 2019. Did newspapers deem the story newsworthy enough to reach the front page? This content analysis of over 900 U.S. newspapers’ front pages published on July 6, 2015 (the day after the 2015 WWC final) or July 8, 2019 (the day after the 2019 WWC final) indicates that, for 1 day, newspapers avoided the trap of gendered, trivialized sport representation. Also, content changes highlight the potential impact from newspaper ownership consolidation on layout design that can have long-term implications for agenda-setting research.

Crawford M.

This qualitative textual analysis considers “voice” in a new sports media platform Just Women’s Sports. Using communicative injustice and collective voice as its theoretical framework, this study considers whose voices are represented in women’s sports media and how those voices are represented. The unique position of Just Women’s Sports as a news outlet independent from mixed-gender sports media outlets and funded by venture capital investments makes it an interesting case study to consider new avenues in sports media production. The findings of this study indicate that Just Women’s Sports’s voice consists of diverse women who promote an inclusive and activist community. Furthermore, this study provides a theoretical intervention in the study of women’s sports media by introducing communicative injustice as an informative theoretical lens.

Scovel S., Nelson M., Thorpe H.

In this paper, we draw upon Hallin’s typology of journalistic writing to examine the role of the media in framing transgender participation in sport as a ‘legitimate controversy’, and thus up for public debate. Focusing on the media coverage before, during and after New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard’s debut at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, we reveal three key strategies used by journalists to frame the topic in polarizing terms: i) sourcing practices, ii) use of science, and iii) questioning of policy. Findings show that Hubbard’s voice and personal experiences were often left out of stories, replaced instead by the ‘authoritative’ voices of scientists and others (i.e., politicians, athletes, anti-trans groups) questioning her Olympic qualification and the International Olympic Committee policy for transgender athletes. Such framings prompt readers to ‘take a side’ in a polarizing debate, rather than encouraging more nuanced, ethical and empathetic responses to a complex issue. This study ultimately highlights the critical role that journalists play in controlling, shaping and/or shifting public opinion regarding the future of sport as an exclusionary or truly inclusive space.

Serving Equality: Feminism, Media, and Women’s Sports offers a much-needed methodological innovation to sports media research by expanding the focus beyond traditional sports media outlets to examine the diversity of media outlets writing about sports. In doing so, Serving Equality draws analytical attention to the ways in which feminism and feminist principles such as equality, progress, empowerment, and intersectionality shape media narratives of women’s sports. With a focus on networked sports media spaces, including news coverage, promotional cultures, and sports films, chapters examine narratives of Title IX, the Olympics, the treatment of women sports journalists, the activism of women athletes, the routine coverage of the sports world, as well as the COVID-19 global pandemic. Serving Equality illustrates how feminism informs not only the media narratives of women’s sports, but how women’s sports contribute to and mobilize feminism in networked media spaces. Serving Equality ultimately encourages students, instructors, researchers, athletes, sport media content producers, and those in the sports industry to consider the ways we can tell stories differently about sportswomen and women’s sports.

Pope S., Williams J., Cleland J.

This article offers an original contribution as the first to focus empirically on men football fans’ attitudes towards women’s sport in a ‘new age’ of UK media coverage, in which women’s sport has experienced a significantly increased and more positive media profile. We draw on online survey responses from 1950 men football fans of different age groups from across the UK. Our methodological approach used techniques emerging out of the principles of grounded theory. We develop a new, three-fold, theoretical model, covering men football fans’ attitudes to women in the sports nexus and men’s performances of masculinities. Our findings show evidence of a change in attitudes towards women in sport, with men performing progressive masculinities. However, there were also signs of a backlash against advances in gender equality, with men performing overtly misogynistic masculinities and covertly misogynistic masculinities.

Parry K.D., Clarkson B.G., Bowes A., Grubb L., Rowe D.

This article examines British media coverage of women’s association football during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, to identify how the media framed the women’s game and how these frames could shape the public perceptions of it. Through a database search of British-based news coverage of women’s football, 100 news articles were identified in the first 6 months after the start of the pandemic. A thematic analysis was conducted, and five dominant frames were detected in the context of COVID-19: 1) financial precariousness of women’s football; 2) the commercial prioritisation of men’s football; 3) practical consideration of the sport (e.g., alterations to national and international competitions); 4) debating the future of women’s football and 5) concern for players (e.g., welfare, uncertain working conditions). These frames depart from the past trivialisation and sexualisation of women’s sport, demonstrate the increased visibility of women’s football, and shift the narrative towards the elite stratum of the game. Most of this reporting was by women journalists, while men were shown to write less than women about women’s football. This research advocates continued diversification of the sports journalism workforce to dissolve the hegemonic masculine culture that still largely dominates the industry.

Cooky C., Council L.D., Mears M.A., Messner M.A.

For 3 decades we have tracked and analyzed the quantity and quality of coverage of women’s and men’s sports in televised news and highlights shows. In this paper, we report on our most recent iteration of the longitudinal study, which now includes an examination of online sports newsletters and social media. The study reveals little change in the quantitative apportionment of coverage of women’s and men’s sports over the past 30 years. Men’s sports—especially the “Big Three” of basketball, football and baseball—still receive the lion’s share of the coverage, whether in-season or out of season. When a women’s sports story does appear, it is usually a case of “one and done,” a single women’s sports story obscured by a cluster of men’s stories that precede it, follow it, and are longer in length. Social media posts and online sports newsletters’ coverage, though a bit more diverse in some ways, mostly reflected these same patterned gender asymmetries. Gender-bland sexism continued as the dominant pattern in 2019 TV news and highlights’ stories on women’s sports. Three themes of this “gender-bland” coverage include: 1) nationalism, 2) asymmetrical gender marking coupled with local parochialism, and 3) community service/ charitable contributions.