Gender in Sports

Today in my sports writing class we've been reading about a topic that really hits home for me: gender in the sports world. With all of the negative things that I had to deal with for being a female hockey player when the sport was just picking up in Iowa, I was really interested in reading the findings of John Vincent.

In his piece entitled "Equitable Media Coverage of Female and Male Athletes: Is there a solution?" Vincent examined newspapers to see: 1.) How many stories on female athletes where there? 2.) What were the lengths of the pieces? 3.) Where were the pieces placed in the news paper [front page, back page, inside, etc.]? 4.) Size and number of photographs. 5.) The manner in which the females were written about [With sexual innuendo? Twisting their 'gender role'? He then compared these findings to those he discovered with men's sports.

Vincent found that when women are placed in the newspaper many of the stories are written for a heterosexual male readership who finds the woman sexually desirable (IE: Anna Kournikova) or they are in the fields of stereotypically 'female' sports like gymnastics, tennis and swimming. He concluded that these facts may affect girls in a negative way because they try to fit into the same type of picture of sexualized athletic perfection rather than seeing the female athletes who are strong and pushing gender boundaries.

While I applaud Vincent for his work and dedication, I think that it is unlikely that women's sports will ever receive the same attention as men's sports as a whole. Newspapers are dwindling and they need to be writing and publishing stories that people care about and want to read. The sad truth is, a lot of people just don't care about women's sports enough to want to read a half page story about them (unless something miraculous has occurred or it's a 'touchy-feely' people story that makes you go awwww). Newspapers are a business. What sells is going to be placed at the top and what doesn't may be mentioned, but it will be placed on the inside of the section under the fold.