The first thing to be looked at is the number of stories by gender. The gender of the stories was determined by asking the coders to assess the proportion of women of individuals involved in the story thus focusing not on the number of women seen (e.g. as bystanders) but on the number of women of individuals that are a part of the story. Based on that, the stories were split up in three groups. The first group is stories which focus only or almost only on men. The vast majority of these stories shows men only but in a few of them women might have appeared in a minor role. The second group is stories which focus only or almost only on women with perhaps one or two men appearing in between. The third group is stories where men and women appear to a more or less equal extent.
The most striking finding of the SMS comparative study is the obvious absence of women from European sports news. Out of every five reports, nearly four involve exclusively or almost exclusively men. As for the remaining part about, approximately one tenth involves men and women in fairly equal proportions, and a little more than one tenth is exclusively or close to exclusively on women.
Only (or almost only)
women 13%
About equal men and women
9%
Only (or almost only)
men 78%
This absence of women is significant for several reasons. Firstly, it reveals that sports news definitely does not reflect the true proportions of sport practitioners by sex. Secondly, the male bias in sports news is likely to present young boys with a far greater number of role models than young girls are provided with. It is thus safe to say that European sports coverage centres on men, whether in terms of the amount of coverage or the number of reports. Every measurement, regardless of its approach, points in the same direction.
Looking at the Olympic period on one hand and news stories collected outside the Olympic period on the other indicates that women do have better access to sport news within the Olympic period. This is perhaps not surprising, bearing in mind that all of the world’s best female athletes compete at the games. They and their achievements cannot be ignored when such a big international event takes place. This suggests that women have to be the best at an international standard to be noticed in the sport news.
72 82 12 8 15 9 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Within Olympic period Outside Olympic period
%
Only (or almost only) men About equal men and women Only (or almost only) women
Figure 2. Stories by gender outside and within the Olympic period.
Several members of the expert advisory group expressed their concern that sport journalism as well as the sports world itself is somewhat governed by the interests of sponsors which limits the possibilities of the media to chose what they want to cover. If this is the case then one would expect to find greater gender equality in stories which come from the local or national level where the newspapers and TV stations should have more flexibility. This is not the case, however, and as it turns out women are less likely to appear in stories labelled as local or national events than in international sport news. This further supports the idea that women have to be outstanding in regards to international standards to appear in sport news. It is not enough for sportswomen to be
amongst the best in their own country or region. Their local and national achievements are not seen as interesting.
91 70 82 83 6 13 11 5 3 17 6 12 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Local or national event International event Local or national event International event Within Olympic period Outside Olympic period
%
Only (or almost only) men About equal men and women Only (or almost only) women
Figure 4. Stories by gender, period and by location of the event.
This finding then does not support the view that international sports are more dominated by money and marketing issues and therefore there is no room for unconventional events such as women’s sports in the news. One might think that the Olympic Games, being an international event, give a biased view of the situation as we have already seen the increased proportion of women during the Olympic period. From the data gathered evident, however, that even outside the Olympic period women get significantly more international attention than local or national. This suggests there must be other reasons for the absence of women in sport news than global marketing of international men’s sports events. Either men’s national and local sport events are just as well marketed or the marketing and money factor simply does not play a significant role when it comes to proportion of women in sport news. It can be inferred that women do have to be successful at an international standard to be valued as worthy of news coverage and the reason for their absence is not the intense marketing of men’s international sport alone. Another interesting comparison which further supports this conclusion is that women do not fare better in newspapers than in television. Newspapers should have a greater opportunity to devote space to women’s sports whereas television would probably be more selective in terms of the number of stories. When comparing television and newspapers and the two different periods, the possibility of finding a story on women in sports news is greatest in television during the Olympic period but lowest in newspapers outside the Olympic period.
66 77 79 85 15 10 8 8 19 13 13 7 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 TV Newspaper TV Newspaper Within Olympic period Outside Olympic period
%
Only (or almost only) men About equal men and women Only (or almost only) women