Disparity between women’s and men’s sports coverage
Recently, Argentina triumphed over Brazil at the Copa América, the men’s football tournament in South America, and Italy emerged victorious over England at the UEFA Euro 2020, the European football championship. In the ongoing ODI series in Sri Lanka, the Indian cricket team has won against Sri Lanka in the first two matches. Most of us are aware of these events, and we have collectively expressed our enthusiasm and excitement time and again. When was the last time we learned and talked about women playing and winning any sport with similar excitement? Maybe when Harleen Deol’s breathtaking catch at an India vs England cricket match broke the internet. Oh, by the way, did I call the Indian men’s national cricket team “the Indian cricket team”? Alas!
We hardly like to watch women play even in this 21st century when so many of us claim to be advocates of feminism. This is rooted in the less importance we give to them as compared to male athletes. Virat Kohli has 137 million followers on Instagram, whereas Mithali Raj has just 1.4 million followers. The media too knows what will attract more readers to its stories, and hence the media coverage of women’s sports is marginalized. A study conducted by Cheryl Cooky, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Purdue University, who also studies the representation of women’s sports in the media, found that in 2019, the coverage of women athletes on televised news and highlight shows, including ESPN’s SportsCenter, totalled only 5.4% of all airtime, a negligible change from the 5% observed in 1989 and 5.1% in 1993.
The Tokyo Olympics has begun today. The Tokyo 2020 Media Handbook contains some upsetting facts. It says that male athletes are 67% more likely to be a lead story, female athletes are 20% more likely to be spoken for by a male coach, female athletes are more likely to be pictured with their spouses/partners, the top words for female athletes include ‘aged’, ‘older’, ‘married’, whereas for male athletes, words like ‘fast’, ‘strong’ and ‘beat’ are used, and only 20% of the reporters and 10% of the photographers present at the Rio 2016 Olympics were female. This time, the Sunday Herald has sent only 5 male reporters to cover the Tokyo Olympics, giving no opportunity to women reporters to report on the games who could write from a woman’s perspective when needed. There are some guidelines too given in the handbook on how one must cover women’s sports and describe female athletes. The need to give equal coverage to all sports has also been emphasised. These are conclusive of the fact that stories written on women’s sports, women athletes and their fortes are always only a handful and often derogatory in some way or the other.
