Gender Stereotypes

While participation of women in sports has increased, the media representation of women in sports remains problematic. Even the most talented elite female athletes like Michelle Kwan and Monica Seles are portrayed in a sexual fashion, as a way of deemphasizing their athleticism and neutralizing any possible threat they might seem to pose to male viewers. Very few male athletes are portrayed in such an objectified manner; they are portrayed as competitors first and foremost, not as personalities. Also, the media coverage of athletes is disproportionately focused on male athletes. The coverage of female athletes tends to stress individualized female sports where women can be sexualized like tennis and figure skating, versus competitive team sports like basketball and soccer.

This article talked about the daunting unequal media coverage in sports of male sports teams in comparison to females.They researched the true differentiations of coverage between men and women sports. The actual percentage difference of coverage of male vs female sports discovered in their research truly is unfathomable. Men’s sports receive 96.3% of the airtime, women’s sports 1.6% and gender neutral topics were 2.1%. When you think back about twenty years ago and the coverage of media people tend to think that America is generally trending positively forward, however that is not the case for the coverage of women's athletics. It has actually gone down since then. Although on the scarce occasion that they are feature in the news, more often than not they are conveyed in the stereotypical way: as wives, girlfriends, or mothers. When media is highlighting these aspects instead of their talent, hard work or success it takes away from their image as an athlete and it demonstrating that it is acceptable to do so in society. However if male athlete achieved equal success and he was a father, that

Gender stereotyping in sports media is something we see everyday in magazines and on TV. Since sports were invented, males have dominated one of Canada’s largest pastimes. Reasons for this being physicality and strength, but as time progressed women began to become more involved in the culture of sport. Today there is almost an equal amount of women participating in sports as man, yet women are still not being represented with the same approach as men. About a month ago I found a video online that followed a sports reporter who was trying to make a point about gender stereotyping within sports media. He would interview professional male athletes but rather than ask them the typical interview questions we see in male sports, such as “has your workout routine changed since…” but rather asked them questions that are typically related to female athlete interviews such as one that was asked to swimmer Michael Phelps “Shaving your body hair gives you an edge in the pool, but how about your love life”, or “any comments about reports about your girlish figure”. At the end of the video they show real women athletes being asked these types of questions in real interviews. The men’s reactions of embarrassment to disgust vs. the women’s reactions of showing no surprise to being asked these derogatory questions, says it all. It is no surprise that the sexualization of female athletes is something all too common in sports media. We’ll be looking into the idea of sexualisation in

Before I conducted this media analysis about women in sports and sport broadcasting, I hypothesized the obvious - that more male sports would be in the media, and that there would be more male sports broadcasters as well. Through my observations I did find that the sports arena and sports broadcasting sphere are male dominated. However, I also found that although there are not many stories about women, there has been a steady progression and magazines like Sports Illustrated are becoming bold enough to highlight women athletes in a magazine that is targeted towards a male audience. Although women still have a long way to go, they are making some headway into the male-dominated sports arena.

Turn on a sports channel, odds are it is a male sport or the talking of men in sports playing. The odds that this is true is because according to the Washington Post, “in 2014, ‘SportsCenter’ dedicated just two percent of its highlight program to women’s sports” (Talbi). That would mean that they could go nearly an entire show and only mention women once. Women compared to men in their image of their respective sports is incredibly less. Women are shown as more of an attractive side while men are shown as more heroic or athletic. Studies have been taken showing how unfair women are shown in sports compared to men. How does the attractiveness and athleticism of women’s sports play a role in their sponsorships and media portrayal? Women’s attractiveness

In sports there is huge gender inequality in the media with women athletes often only receiving attention for having good looks or the best body, rather than their athletic abilities. Men, however, don’t receive this attention and people only focus on their athletic prowess. This report will review and analyse two examples of how the media portrays different genders in accordance with the following question: “How does the media portray men and women in sport?

The amount of articles and news headlines that women are featured in is vastly unequal to that of men. Women only featured 3% of all articles in our local media source compared to men at 92%, in some instances animals featured as equal to that of the women. This is largely due to that women sports simply do not generate as much interest as men sports. The stereotype is that women are portrayed for their beauty, sex appeal and support roles rather than their sporting capabilities or skill level. The media does not recognise that female sports are as physically demanding and do require the amount of skill as that of men.

When it comes to women in the media they do not get represented very well and they tend to be poorly portrayed as well. Men are the largest consumers, players, and of sports. So media focus more on male sports and athletes. This may be the reason women are advised not to be engaged in sports and how their gender is presented in the media. Some people think that if more women participate in sports, the media would be fairer. In today’s society, the media focuses more on women’s looks

Looking at women’s portrayal in the sport industry through another perspective, women journalists who cover sports and discuss sports topics are thought of as “not knowing what they are talking about” when it comes to sports topics. The power of social media has brought attention to this issue in the way women sports journalists and media members are diminished for their opinion for the simple fact that they are women.

For this section, we will start first of all with this statement from Toft (2011), who claimed that sportswomen were the main focus of only 9% of articles in a recent sur-vey of 80 newspapers in 22 countries (Toft, 2011). To continue we will examine examples from one of the biggest sports nation, the USA. A study in the United States in 2011 found that the main television networks only dedicate 1.6% of airtime to women's sports compared to 6.3% in 2004. In terms of overall sports coverage, female athletics on television and in print media is more or less 8% (Adam, 2011). Cooky

With the rise of feminism, gender inequality has been quite the topic in todays time. With the wanting of equal rights and treatment it has been pointed out as per which all places males have the hegemonic overview and women are the oppressed; one of the areas where its unequal in gender is in sport. This paper will examine and break down the issues regarding sex and gender biases within sports in modern day media and how it can be resolved.

Still, many women find themselves in the place of Ponder. Some don’t feel the sacrifices of family and time are worth their positions, which are normally short-lived and not as desired as the beats men typically work. Marie Hardin’s and Stacie Shain’s article “Female Sports Journalists: Are We There Yet? ‘No’” discussed many of the reasons why a woman covering sports shouldn’t seem unnatural in today’s society. They, however, acknowledged that a majority of sports desks in newsrooms operate without women.

Women’s sports are underreported and underrepresented in television sports news. In recent studies from Dr. Wayne Wilson states that men’s sports received ninety-five percent of the air time, women only received at least five percent, and gender neutral topics received about one percent of air time. Televised sports news should provide more coverage of existing women’s sports. This statistic points out that women are basically less valuable and less interesting than men.

From the three network affiliates they studied, they found that 96.3 percent of the coverage was for men’s sports and women only received 1.6 percent (Messner and Cooky 4). When analyzing the coverage of Sports Center, which is arguably the most popular sports show on television, they found that women still only received just 1.4 percent of their coverage (4). This study also found that 100 percent of the Sports Center programs had a lead story that was about men’s sports (4). Even the most renowned and credible sports show, which only shows sports all year long, does not even provide women’s sports with equal attention. Even more shocking than this was that the study also revealed that reporters devoted more coverage to men’s sports that were out of season than they did women’s sports that were actually in season (4). This can be extremely disrespectful to female athletes when their sport is pushed aside and ignored so that a men’s sport that is not even being played can be covered by the media. These women put all their effort into performing their sport at the highest level, but their media attention gets replaced by men who are in their off-season.

The problem here extends even further to the fact that most of sports editors and authors are male. The inequality present in Canadian athletics is not new; it has been noted that between the years 1954 to 1987, 90.8% of Sports Illustrated articles were of discriminatory nature and tended to focus on white male athletes by writing lengthy articles and consequently resulting in shorter and biased articles for females and black athletes. With restraints from the media - an important medium of athletic information for the public and sports scouts - females have faced a difficult past in regards to successfully promoting their achievements and careers. Furthermore, it has been noted that females are more often to be considered for coverage if they were participating in aesthetic sports, rather than men.