Women in the Sports Pages

Abstract

Despite women participating in a variety of sports at an international level, the Australian sports media is dominated by male commentators, male identified sports, and male athletes. Much of the sports reporting in Australia surround high profile male team sports such as rugby league (NRL), cricket, and Australian Rules football (AFL). Women sports do not generally feature heavily in sports coverage in neither print nor broadcast mediums. However, every four years the Olympic Games change this culture somewhat. Over the period of the Olympic Games, during the lead up to the Games and in the weeks post-Games, women athletes can be found in the sports pages. During this period, Australian women athletes are celebrated and awarded space in newspaper coverage, particularly if their athletic performance brings success to the country. This ongoing longitudinal study documents the prevalence of female sports stories in two state (New South Wales) and one national newspaper in Australia, “The Sydney Morning Herald,” “The Daily Telegraph,” and “The Australian,” between 2008 and 2012. In the broader study, newspapers were analyzed for two weeks prior to the Olympics beginning, during the Olympics, and two weeks after the Olympics were completed. However in the current paper, a small slice of this research between 2008-2012 will be analyzed in relation to gender (male, female, or a combination of male and female athletes), the articles relationship to the Olympic Games, and the general content of sports news articles. The content and language used in the newspaper articles are examined using a critical feminist perspective and such a perspective will investigate the ways that women are often ‘feminized’, ‘gender marked’, ‘infantilized’, and ‘heterosexualized’ in the sports media during both Olympic and non-Olympic years.