Sexism In Women’s Sports Coverage
One doesn’t need a research study to know that daily updates on women’s sports are few and hard to find. Today, Mirabai Chanu won the Olympic silver for India at Tokyo Olympics 2021 and it is possibly the first time, India has really noticed the 26-year old athlete.
Irrespective of the fact that Chanu has had a prolific career, with achievements ranging from winning gold in women’s 48kg world championships, Anaheim, USA (2017) to Silver in women’s 48kg, Commonwealth Games, Glasgow, 2014, among many others.
A 2021 study published in the Communication & Sport publication of Sage Journals showed that women’s sports coverage is a one-time affair, which tends to spike during world cups or other internationally significant events.
In the past 30 years, there has been little to no change in the amount of media coverage given to women’s sports. Even after the advent of social media and digital publications, the amount of day-to-day coverage on women’s sports has remained sporadic, the study added.
Another interesting observation of the study was about “gender-bland sexism.” One of the researchers of this study, Cheryl Cooky, associate professor at Purdue University described it as sports commentators downplaying the achievements of women athletes and showing less excitement for their big milestones.
“To me, it’s like, if we can’t sexualize them, then we’re just not going to really talk about them at all. Or, if we have to talk about them, then we’re just going to talk about them in really boring and bland ways,” Cooky told Neiman Reports.
This naturally has an impact on how people perceive women sports, a 2020 BBC survey carried out in 14 Indian states with 10,181 respondents found that 50% of the surveyed people could not name any women in sports. Further, 42% of the respondents said that “women’s sports were not as entertaining as men’s.”
