The biggest story surrounding the NCAA Tournaments this year has been the publicized differences between the men’s and women’s tournaments, whether it is the on-site training facilities, the swag bags, Covid tests, or the playing facilities themselves.
I’m not going to call them shocking differences, because if you’re been around sports for 27 seconds, this won’t shock you. It’s impressive how women’s athletes are using social media (especially TikTok, and there’s a future research area for us) to publicize these differences and call out the NCAA.
For our purposes here, what does research tell us about the disparity between men’s and women’s sports, especially in the context of media coverage?It’s no surprise that a generation of research validates what we all instinctively and anecdotally know to be true — that women’s sports get far less coverage than men’s sports.
In 2013, Cheryl Cookey, Michael Nessner and Robin Hexum found that coverage of women’s sports on Sportscenter and the three local news affiliates in Los Angeles was at an all-time low. In a 2016 study published in the Newspaper Research Journal, Hans Schmidt found that over a 30-year span, The New York Times’ sports coverage focused on men’s sports 86 percent of the time, while just 5 percent of sports coverage focused on women’s sports — and that articles on women’s sports were likely to be shorter. Ronald Bishop found in a 2003 study that while there was an increase in feature coverage of women’s sports from 1980-1996, there was not a significant change in the percentage of the magazine devoted to women’s sports.
Kevin Hull from the University of South Carolina found that women’s sports make up just five percent of Tweets sent by local TV sportscasters, that women’s sportscasters were less likely to Tweet about women’s sports than their male colleagues (probably in part to avoid being pigeonholed in their careers), and that broadcasters from smaller cities were more likely to Tweet about women’s sports than those in larger markets. Similarly, In a study Kent Kaiser published in Communication and Sport in 2017, small and medium-sized newspapers were found to have covered women’s sports more equitably than larger-market papers.
Intuitively, we can guess at the answer, right? There’s the widespread belief that men don’t care about women’s sports. “No one goes to women’s games, why should we?” one reporter told author Mariah Burton Nelson. Marie Hardin, one of the most important sports media researchers in our field and now dean of the Penn State’s college of communications, surveyed 285 sports editors at newspapers in the Southeastern United States. In a study published in J&MC Quarterly in 2005, Hardin found:
(1) Sports section gatekeepers determine content based more on their own sense about audience interests than on the audience itself; and, (2) Their sense about audience interest is driven, at least in part, by personal beliefs and hegemonic ideology about women’s sports
A substantial percentage of editors have beliefs about women that would justify excluding them from coverage.
A substantial percentage of editors indicate some resentment of the law that protects women’s sports.
But beyond both the casual and institutionalized sexism, media sociology can tell us why these inequities persist. In a landmark study from 1986 in Sociology of Sport, Nancy Theberge and Alan Cronk found that the routine practices of sports journalism are set in a way that they favor men’s sports coverage.
“In casting the news net, journalists seek subjects that are both deemed newsworthy and able to provide reliable and accessible news material. The advantage enjoyed by men’s sports lies in the assumption of greater public interest and the greater resources of men’s commercial sports that guarantee preferred access to the media.”
In a fascinating study for Communication and Sport in 2017, Merryn Sherwood, Angela Osborne, Matthew Nicholson, and Emma Sherry studied newspapers in Australia that covered women’s sports more than their competitors did. The authors found three factors of newswork that have led to the lack of coverage of women’s sports — the male-dominated sports newsroom, ingrained assumptions about readership, and the systematic, repetitive nature of sports news. By making small changes to these factors - notably, by assigning a beat writer to women’s sports specifically (instead of having women’s sports be the thing that the reporter covering men’s sports does when things are slow) increased coverage of women’s sports by leveraging the routines of journalism.
This essay first appeared in the Sports Media Guy newsletter. You can subscribe for free here