When discussing women athletes, the first thought is usually about their gender, rather than their profession.
Women have been stigmatized with domestic behaviors. When they stand on the field or court, the athletes’ hard work and performances seem to be disvalued, particularly by the mainstream sports media.
Sports media helps propel this stereotype in its unequal coverage of male and female athletes.
According to the documentary “Media Coverage and Female Athletes,”
40 percent of all sports participants are women. However, women’s sports receive only about 4 percent of all sports media coverage.
San Jose State University women’s basketball junior guard Fa-Ko-Fieme’a Hafoka said, “Let’s just talk about ESPN or SportsCenter. The way that they talk about the WNBA compared to the NBA is not the same.”
She said the highlights, the amount of time allocated and the accessibility for the NBA and WNBA is different.
“I think it’s not fair. Many women’s sports should be equal as we’re doing the same thing, we’re competing at the same level, we’re out here doing what they do. There should be no difference,” Hafoka said.
In sports publications such as ESPN, the articles and the time devoted to cover women’s sports on the network are cynically low.
The article “The Inequality of Sport: Women < Men” shows a five-year study on the ESPN show SportsCenter. Statistics showed that SportsCenter devoted only
2 percent of its airtime to women’s sports. The research in 2002 found the gender ratio of stories ran on ESPN was more than 48 to one, strongly favoring men.
A group of SJSU kinesiology students did a research on “Gender Bias in ESPN vs. espnW Content.” The research group investigated the articles about female and male sports posted on espnW and ESPN websites by analyzing the top stories in the home page of each site and “the buzz” located underneath the top stories section of espnW.
Kinesiology senior Joanna Peet shared their findings during the student research fair.
“On the espnW site, there is 25 percent of male articles but there is only 17 percent of female articles, on a website that is supposed to be a platform for women,” Peet said.
Women’s basketball head coach Jamie Craighead said it is hard to judge whether there is a bias because basketball seasons for men and women are different.
However, she said, “When it’s NBA season, you can see highlights from all the games and all the scores. I don’t know that I will see that when it comes to WNBA.”
Craighead said the reason for less coverage on women’s sports is partly because of the generally low interest.
“Media is driven by what consumers want, so I think it would be nice if more females empowered other females. If there are women who are interested in sports, or even if they are not, they are just supporting women, maybe then we would get more coverage,” she said.
According to The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the imbalance in the quality and quantity of sports coverage between women and men still continues.
“Two weeks of Olympic coverage are a rare time when sustained coverage of women sports stars hits the headlines,” stated in the organization’s website.
In the “Gender-Sensitive Indicators for Media” published by the organization, it provided several suggestions for media to decrease the gap between women’s and men’s sports. The suggestions include hosting special “gender and sports” program, handing the mic to women and most importantly, bringing women’s sports to the forefront.
Whether the media should give more exposure to women’s sports or sports fans should pay more attention to female sports, we may never know which needs to happen first. While the imbalance gap has improved throughout the years, there is still a distance to reach equality.
