User:Tristan Welch/sandbox

BATTLE FOR EQUALITY

The 2012 London Olympics were the first games of their kind in which women competed in every sport. The fight for women to gain equality on national levels and in professional leagues, in terms of pay and better funding, has continued; however sports still remain dominated by men, financially and globally. Gender remains a selective and primary factor in terms of determining if women are able-bodied as men and if they should get the same treatment in terms of sports. It is often said[by whom?] that sports are a thing for men, and has become a stereotypical notion within society. Negative gender-based characteristics such as masculinity and femininity have been described as the deciding factor in order to play sports, and has often been held as justifiable dismissing sports equity. '''Although there are various purposes and outcomes of organized teamsport participation in Western cultures, a consistent finding is that sport is principally organized around the political project of physically and symbolically elevating men over women. There was evidence throughout the study that notions of audience interest or preference were based on personal beliefs and assumptions—rather than evidence or research—and in some cases it was clear that these beliefs and assumptions still prioritized the coverage of men’s professional sports .'''

The pay gap in women sports is a controversial issue.[citation needed] Women athletes, in their respective fields, are often get paid far less than their male counterparts, and this has been true for a long time. The difference between the American men's and women's soccer teams' salaries serves as an example regarding pay inequality. Women on the U.S national team earned $99,000 per year, while men earned $263,320 if they were to win 20 exhibition matches. There is a substantial gap in rewards in regards to winning the FIFA World Cup. The German men's national team earned 35 million dollars, while the American women's national team earned 2 million dollars after winning the World Cup. The battle in equality for fair pay divulges in to other sports in which men earn far more than women. Golf is another sport which has a significant rising female presence. In 2014, the PGA tour awarded US$340 million in prize money for men's tournaments, compared to 62 million dollars awarded to the LPGA Tour. Basketball is another sport which has surged in popularity in the last few decades and has significant female presence. In the United States, the NBA organizes top-level professional basketball competition for both sexes, with men playing in the NBA proper and women in the WNBA. A WNBA player's minimum salary is $38,000, while an NBA player's minimum salary is $525,000. An average NBA player makes over $5 million while an average WNBA player makes $72,000. Male athletes generate more revenue for their teams. However, when one compares the revenue earned to salary received, women athletes often get an extremely low[clarification needed] salary in comparison to the revenue they generate and their accomplishments. Although female athletes have come a long way since the establishment of professional sports, they still remain far behind in terms of pay (and ticket sales) and media coverage.[citation needed]

In September 2018, the World Surf League announced equal pay for both male and female athletes for all events. This decision has contributed to the conversation in the world of professional sports surrounding equality.

MEDIA COVERAGE

Media coverage for women's sports is significantly less than the coverage for men's sports.'''Substantial research indicates that women’s sports and female athletes gain only a small fraction of sports media coverage worldwide. Research that has examined why this is the case suggested this can be attributed to three particular factors that govern sports newswork: the male-dominated sports newsroom, ingrained assumptions about readership, and the systematic, repetitive nature of sports news .''' In 1989, a study was conducted that recorded and compared the amount of media coverage of men and women's sports on popular sports commentary shows. Michael Messner and his team in 2010 analyzed three different two-week periods by recording the amount of time that the stories were on air and the content of the stories. After recording sports news and highlights, they wrote a quantitative description of what they saw and a qualitative description of the amount of time that story received.

During that first year that the research was conducted in 1989, it was recorded that 5% of the sports segments were based on women's sports, compared to the 92% that were based on men's sports and the 3% that was a combination of both. In the late 1900s Women's Sports started to gain popularity in the media because of their talent in the Olympics. In 1999, women's sports coverage reached an all-time high when it was recorded at 8.7%. It maintained its higher percentages until it reached an all-time low in 2009, decreasing to 1.6%. The researchers also measured the amount of time that women's sports were reported in the news ticker, the strip that displays information at the bottom of most news broadcasts. When recorded in 2009, 5% of ticker coverage was based on women's sports, compared to the 95% that was based on men's sports. These percentages were recorded in order to compare the amount of media coverage for each gender.

When researching the actual amount of time that women's sports stories were mentioned, they focused specifically on differences between the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the Women's National Basketball Association. They recorded two different time periods: when they were in season and when they were off-season. The WNBA had 8 stories, totaling 5:31 minutes, during their season, which was less than the NBA, which had a total of 72 stories, totaling approximately 65:51 minutes. During the off-season, the WNBA did not receive any stories or time on the ticker, while the NBA received a total of 81, which were approximately 50:15 minutes. When compared, the WNBA had a total of 8 stories and 5:31 minutes while the NBA had 153 stories and 1:56:06 hours. The actual games had several differences in the way the games were presented. The findings were that WNBA games had lower sound quality, more editing mistakes, fewer views of the shot clock and fewer camera angles. There was less verbal commentary and visual statistics about the players throughout the games as well. The quality of the stories has also significantly changed. In past studies, women were sexualized, portrayed as violent, or portrayed as girlfriends, wives and mothers. Female athletes were often included in gag stories that involved sexual dialogue or emphasized their bodies. In Australia, the wives of the men's cricket team members were given more media coverage than the players on the women's cricket team, who also had won more games than the men's rugby team. In 2009, SportsCenter broadcast segments called "Her Story", which was a commentary that highlighted women's athletic careers.

In newspapers articles, coverage on men's sports once again had a greater number of articles than women's sports in a ratio of 23–1. In 1990, a study was conducted that recorded and compared the amount of media coverage of men and women's sports on popular newspapers. They analyzed four different sports magazines for three months and recorded the number of women's sports stories that were featured and the content of the stories. Women's sports made up 3.5%, compared to the 81% of men's coverage. The lengths of these articles were 25–27% shorter than the length of men's articles. There was an international frenzy in 2012 when the first woman that represented Saudi Arabia in the 2012 Olympics competed in track. That was the most women's sports coverage that there had been in several years.Women played 90 minutes of football, 80 minutes of rugby, 18 holes of golf and ran the same distance in a marathon as men. Exactly 12 months later, the newspapers returned to featuring 4% of articles on women's sports. This same trend can be seen with regards to the FIFA World Cup. The 2015 Women's World Cup Final had an average of 25.4 million American viewers throughout the duration of the match, and peaked at 30.9 million viewers. It was the most-viewed game of soccer ever in the United States–men's or women's–by a margin of almost 7 million viewers. Despite this jump in viewership of women's soccer in the U.S., television broadcasting of the women's professional soccer league in the U.S. remained much lower than that of the men's league. Fox Sports Network (the company that owns the rights to broadcast the National Women's Soccer League) broadcast 3 regular season NWSL games and 34 Major League Soccer regular-season games during the 2016 seasons. '''The dearth of coverage of women’s sports is evidenced by the low number of segments (i.e., stories) in our sample. Of the 934 local network affiliate news segments (over 12 hr of broadcasts), 880 were on men’s sports (or approximately 11½ hr), 22 segments (or nearly 18 min) were on gender-neutral sports (e.g., a horse race, coverage of the Los Angeles [LA] marathon, and a recreational sports event), and only 32 segments (about 23 min) featured women’s sports. SportsCenter’s numbers were similar. Of the 405 total SportsCenter segments in our sample (nearly 14 hr), 376 covered men’s sports (slightly over 13 hr), 16 segments were on gender-neutral sports (just over 20 min), and only 13 segments featured women’s sports (approximately 17 min) .'''

A recent article from the Wall Street Journal states “from 2016 to 2018, women's games generated about $50.8 million in revenue compared with $49.9 million for the men, according to U.S. soccer's audited financial statements” (Bachman, 2019). These numbers contrasts the idea that women's sports are not entertaining enough for the viewer or typical fan by $1.9 million. This idea stems from the male dominated sports perspective, which constantly undermines the perception of quality, effort, and potential that women's soccer exhibits. However, we can see through the caliber of women's soccer displayed most recently within the Women's FIFA World Cup of 2019 that it was on par if not better than the level of play of their male counterparts. In fact, the U.S. Women's National Team scored 13 goals against Thailand in their opening match, the most goals scored in any World Cup match in history. The most obvious concern for the liberation of women's sports within media is the advertising dollar. Networks are concerned that if women's soccer is more readily available for fans to enjoy, it will decrease the amount of advertising dollars they pocket. The assumption is that "women's sports are boring, no one will watch, we will lose money".

Amy Godoy-Pressland conducted a study that investigated the relationship between sports reporting and gender in Great Britain. She studied Great Britain's newspapers from January 2008 to December 2009 and documented how media coverage of men's sports and women's sports was fairly equal during the Olympics and then altered after the Olympics were over. "Sportswomen are disproportionately under-represented and the sheer quantity and quality of news items on sportsmen demonstrates how male athletes are represented as dominant and superior to females." She also documented how women's bodies were sexualized in photographs and written coverage, noting that the women featured were either nude, semi-nude, or wearing revealing clothing. "The sexualization of sportswomen in Sunday reporting is commonplace and aimed at the mostly male readership. It promotes the idea of female aesthetics over achievements, while the coverage of women not directly involved in sport misrepresents the place of women in sport and inferiorizes real sportswomen's achievements." The media has the ability to create or prevent interest in women's sports. Excluding women's sports from the media makes it much less likely for young girls to have role models that are women athletes. According to Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota 40% of all athletes in the United States are women but women's sports only receive about 4% of sports media coverage. This amount of coverage has decreased in the last 20 years although there has been a major increase in women athletes.

Media coverage has slightly increased and this is mostly due to social networking.[citation needed] Social media has further exposed women sports out to the public world, and often at a much greater rate than traditional news media. Traditional media has also improved its coverage of women's sports through more exposure time and using better equipment to record the events. Recent research has shown that in the past twenty years, camera angles, slow motion replays, quality and graphics regarding the presentation of women sports has gradually improved. However, mainstream media still is far behind in its showcasing of female sports in comparison to that of men's. A study has shown that ESPN, which began airing women NCAA tournament in 2003, aired eleven women tournament segments in comparison to one-hundred men's tournament segments. ESPN and other sports outlets are airing more female-oriented sporting events; however the length of the segments are very small. This representative data is showcases a main part of the minimal interaction the media has with women athletes. Media coverage of women sports in the United States has further justified the divisional hierarchy faced by women athletes in terms of popularity and coverage. Scholarly studies (Kane, M. J., LaVoi, N. M., Fink, J. S. (2013) also show that when women athletes were given the option to pick a photo of a picture that would increase respect for their sport, they picked an on-the-court competency picture. However, when women athletes were told to pick a picture that would increase interest in their sport, 47% picked a picture that sexualized the women athlete. The UK is more representative than the United States with the BBC giving women's sports about 20% of their sports coverage (BBC spokesperson). Many women athletes in the UK do not see this as adequate coverage for the 36% of women who participate in sports. NewsChain is the first commercial publisher totally dedicated to women's sport coverage based in the UK.

SOURCES

Laucella, Pamela C., Marie Hardin, Steve Bien-Aimé and Dunja Antunovic. 2017. "Diversifying the Sports Department and Covering Women's Sports: A Survey of Sports Editors." Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 94(3):772-792 ( https://manowar.tamucc.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1934460324?accountid=7084 ).

Cooky, C., Messner, M., & Musto, M. (2015). "it's dude time!": A quarter century of excluding women's sports in televised news and highlight shows. Communication & Sport, 3(3), 261-287. doi:10.1177/2167479515588761

Joseph, L. J., & Anderson, E. (2016). The influence of gender segregation and teamsport experience on occupational discrimination in sport-based employment. Journal of Gender Studies, 25(5), 586-598. doi:10.1080/09589236.2015.1070712

Sherwood, M., Osborne, A., Nicholson, M., & Sherry, E. (2017). Newswork, News Values, and Audience Considerations: Factors That Facilitate Media Coverage of Women’s Sports. Communication & Sport., 5(6), 647–668. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167479516645535

COOKY-The dearth of coverage of women’s sports is evidenced by the low number of segments (i.e., stories) in our sample. Of the 934 local network affiliate news segments (over 12 hr of broadcasts), 880 were on men’s sports (or approximately 11½ hr), 22 segments (or nearly 18 min) were on gender-neutral sports (e.g., a horse race, coverage of the Los Angeles [LA] marathon, and a recreational sports event), and only 32 segments (about 23 min) featured women’s sports. SportsCenter’s numbers were similar. Of the 405 total SportsCenter segments in our sample (nearly 14 hr), 376 covered men’s sports (slightly over 13 hr), 16 segments were on gender-neutral sports (just over 20 min), and only 13 segments featured women’s sports (approximately 17 min).

JOSEPH AND ANDERSON-

Although there are various purposes and outcomes of organized teamsport participation in Western cultures, a consistent finding is that sport is principally organized around the political project of physically and symbolically elevating men over women.

SHERWOOD-Substantial research indicates that women’s sports and female athletes gain only a small fraction of sports media coverage worldwide. Research that has examined why this is the case suggested this can be attributed to three particular factors that govern sports newswork: the male-dominated sports newsroom, ingrained assumptions about readership, and the systematic, repetitive nature of sports news.

There was evidence throughout the study that notions of audience interest or preference were based on personal beliefs and assumptions—rather than evidence or research—and in some cases it was clear that these beliefs and assumptions still prioritized the coverage of men’s professional sports.