Culture and Media

The struggle facing female athletes is made even more difficult by the domination and control by males in all the structural levels of sport. The predominance of males is evident in the media coverage and corporate support afforded female athletes.

The media has been a key accessory to the underdevelopment of women's sports. The media has underepresented and misrepresented the accomplishments of female athletics. Women athletes are underrepresented in all forms of media coverage of sports, including newspaper accounts, sports magazines, television broadcasts, sport novels and feature films. Numerous studies of newspaper sports sections and television coverage have found that female sports are routinely ignored, or given only a fractional percentage of the coverage afforded male sports. For example, a 1989 study of the Globe and Mail sports section for one particular Saturday, found that only a very small percentage of coverage concerned female sports, leading readers to the conclusion that on typical day in Canada, women's sports for the most part don't happen.

Even in cases where female sports receive adequate media coverage, female athletes and sports are often trivialized, depicted as being inferior to male athletes and sports. This trivialization occurs in many forms, from sexist comments about their physical attractiveness and private lives, to inferior technical production of televised events, and modification of team names by adding feminine suffixes (i.e. Tigerettes). This type of media coverage does little to promote the development of female sports at it relegates the real athletic accomplishments by women to the sidelines.

In some cases, women athletes are presented by the media not as athletes, but as objects of heterosexual desire. The most blatant expamle is Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit issue, which has nothing to do with athletics, and is often referred to as being soft-core pornography.

Even legitimate sports phenomena, such as the aerobics craze of the 1980's, became a vehicle for the heterosexualiztion of women's bodies. New products and fitness regimes were marketed through the media in such a way as to promote the "ideal" female vision...thin, beautiful, white, and young.

Media attention is important to all athletes in today's sporting world, as more media coverage leads to more sponsorship and corporate opportunities. Corporate sponsorship is the fuel of professional sports today. The corporate world is guilty of poor support of female sports as a whole. The most obvious reason is that the business world remains a predominantly male regime, despite the strides women have taken in the last few decades. Another reason is that in terms of audience figures, the vast majority of sports fans are male, and the sponsors argue that they are only trying to reach their "target markets" by sponsoring primarly male athletic events. With the growth in the number of female fans, however, sponsors will undoubtedly have to reform their endorsment and sponsorship policies.

Several of the obstacles that have faced women's sport and female athletes have been exposed. The underdevelopment of women's sports is due to a complex, ongoing discrimination practised by the media, corporate sponsors and the male dominated sports world. Fortunately, there are signals that the situation is improving. The feminist movement continues to grow, bringing with it more research on issues that affect all women, not just athletes. Many of the bastions of male dominance, such as sports administration and media coverage, are beginning to be infiltrated by strong-willed women. Many of the social and systemic factors are firmly entrenched, however, and the struggle for equality will be slow.

Improved Coverage

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