A Look at Inequality in Sports Pt. I

Women are amazing. They’re smart, strong and beautiful. They can do anything they put their minds to. And yet, there’s still a strong mindset in society that women are the weaker sex. HA! Have you ever seen a woman run in heels? Men should be terrified.

Women are badass (I literally cannot stress that enough), but when it comes to sports, there’s a widely held belief that women are no good.

Women are supposed to be dainty and feminine and men are buff, strong, and violent.

You can see prime examples of this mindset in practically any commercial. One example that comes to mind is an ad from WTA back in 2011:

Why can't women just be strong? Why do we always have to be beautiful? Nobody looks at male athletes and thinks "oh he needs to smile more. He doesn't look as hot as normal".

Women always have to look pretty because no one takes their athletic abilities seriously, and it's outrageous.

McCombs and Shaw were researching the role of the media in the 1968 presidential campaign when they created their theory of agenda-setting. While there are different subcategories of this theory, the overall idea is that the media can’t tell you what to think, but it can certainly tell you what to think about. The media can also shape how we perceive specific information and our feelings towards different topics.

Looking at Jeffrey Allen Miles’ book Management and Organization Theory: a Jossey-Bass Reader, he describes agenda setting as two levels:

“There are two levels of agenda-setting. The first level examines how the salience (or importance) of issues (such as corporate reputation) portrayed by the mass media influences the salience of issues for the public. The key variable is public attention to issues. The second level examines how the media’s portrayed attributes of the important issues influence the public’s perceived attributes of those same issues (McCombs & Evatt, 1995; McCombs, Shaw, & Weaver, 1997). The key variable here is comprehension, both substantive and evaluative (also called cognitive and affective). News media convey more than just facts to the public. They also convey feelings and tone, which influence public cognitions about important issues (McCombs & Ghanem, 2001).

So the first level is how the media portrays certain events as being more important to the public, and the second level is how the media shapes the way we should feel about said events.

While the effects are not meant to be inherently negative, it’s been found that if people aren’t exposed to different events, then they won’t care about it and see it as being less important.

From McCombs and Guo, “when news stories report on an object, an issue, a public figure, or whatever, some aspects of the object are emphasized, some are mentioned less frequently, and other aspects not at all. The same is true when individuals think about an object or talk about that object with others. In other words, for each object on the first-level agenda, there is an agenda of attributes that can be rank-ordered in terms of their appearance in the news and in terms of their appearance in people’s descriptions of public issues and other objects.”

So think of this in terms of women’s sports. How much do you really hear about them in the media?

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Women’s sports are rarely broadcasted on television, let alone openly talked about. Google sports and look at what news stories come up. You have to dig before finding anything even remotely related to women. Going further in my search, if there did happen to be a story about women’s sports, it was limited to one per page.

Page two of Google is honestly just above the dark web, so no one is going to ever reach an article about women’s sports.

They don’t want to catch a virus.

Another factor of barely reaching major networks is the lack of broadcasting rights. The NWHL and the CWHL (Canadian Women’s Hockey League) don’t own any rights to broadcast.

The NWHL streams all of their games on YouTube, but it’s expensive to do so. Their most viewed videos barely get them 1.9k viewers. For the NHL, just their basic highlights of regular-season games garner them anywhere between 16k - 100k+ views. Highlights of playoff games rank even higher.

Again, it’s the idea that stations won’t get views if they broadcast women’s sports, so they won’t exactly be tossing out licenses all willy-nilly.

Another major contributing factor though is money. The NWHL simply does not have the money the NHL does. The NHL can afford to broadcast across different stations on television, radio, have commercials, etc.. The New York Rangers’ franchise alone is worth an estimated $1.55 billion according to Forbes. Add up all of the teams’ values and you have a pretty penny or two.

The NWHL can hardly even pay their players. There’s no way they can afford to do anything but stream games on YouTube.

Related: NWHL in Financial Distress

Now, the NWHL is still a small league compared to other international leagues. So to make it fair, we can look at the viewership of tennis as their professional women’s league is a bit more well-known.

From The Times, “Figures released by the All England Club revealed that the audience for the women’s final on July 14, in which Angelique Kerber defeated Serena Williams, peaked at 4.6 million [viewers], while the peak figure for Novak Djokovic’s victory over Kevin Anderson the next day, which clashed with the football World Cup final, was 4.5 million.”

According to Tennisworldusa.com, Federer brought in views with his rivalry against Rafael Nadal, who are currently ranked 4th and 2nd respectively.

“The men's final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal got a 0.9 [Nielsen rating] at 3 a.m. on ESPN, with the network saying that the broadcast 'may be the most-watched' ESPN telecast ever in that time slot. It also got a 0.7 for its 9 a.m. rerun, with the two telecasts representing increases of 80 percent and 75 percent, respectively, from the Novak Djokovic-Andy Murray final a year ago.

In layman's terms 9% of all televisions in the world, which is roughly 1.4 billion, tuned in to watch this match. That is a whopping 126 million viewers.

The women's final between Serena and Venus Williams got a 0.7 for the 3 a.m. showing, up 17 percent from a year ago, and a 0.6 for the rerun.

Williams got 98 million viewers when ESPN aired her game.

So Serena Williams, who again is the number one tennis player in the world according to sportsshow.com, got fewer views than some men who are not at the top of their game.

No shade to those guys, they’re still excellent players, but Serena Williams is #1. Well maybe #2 but only to Smitty WerbenJagerManJensen. He was #1.

Furthermore, when women’s sports are covered, the reporters are incredibly dull. They’ll cover men’s sports with extreme vim and vigor, but when it comes to talking about how women play? The difference is night and day.

PSMag.com discusses these differences in their article The Covert Sexism of Sports News: “The authors present a typical example of men's sports coverage, from a SportsCenter segment on the Minnesota Timberwolves' Andrew Wiggins:

‘On Monday, [Wiggins] put two 76ers defenders in the spin cycle, throwing down a monstrous two-handed jam before Nerlens Noel could even get there. And Wiggins doin' it on D! Noel was victim to one of his highlight blocks in the same game, and Spurs rookie Kyle Anderson [was] also rejected by Wiggins on Sunday.’”

For comparison, here's a SportsCenter segment I found on the performance of Shannon Szabados, an Olympic gold medalist and the first woman to play in a Canadian men's professional hockey league: ‘She had 27 saves, it was a 4-3 loss for her Columbus Cottonmouths to the visiting Knoxville Ice Bears in the Southern Professional Hockey League, but Shannon Szabados did work.’”

How drab! It’s just the numbers and that’s it. There’s no language, no passion. The men get excitement. The women get monotony.

This is a classic example of agenda-setting theory. The media is purposefully covering men's sports more as well as making them seem more exciting than women's sports. People are going to be more interested in what is being covered with excitement rather than the story that gets a mere two sentences with zero adjectives.

Livestrong.com also touches on the topic in their article “Gender Discrimination in Sports.” They discuss how women are often passed over for scholarships in sports and how there have been laws passed to help women succeed, but they aren’t being enforced.

Straight from the website, they also discuss how female athletes aren’t covered nearly as much as men: “Although approximately 40 percent of sport and physical activity participants are women, only 6 to 8 percent of total media sports coverage is devoted to their athletics, according to the Women's Sports Foundation. Additionally, in a study of four major newspapers--USA Today, the Boston Globe, the Orange County Register, and the Dallas Morning news--women-only sports stories totaled just 3.5 percent of all sports stories.”

It doesn’t get much more clear-cut than that. Textbook agenda-setting staring you in the face. The media can’t tell us what to think, but it damn sure can tell us what to think about. And if women are only getting 3.5% of all sports coverage, no one is going to pay them any mind.

There you have it. Part 1 of my seemingly never-ending rant on women’s sports. Due to agenda-setting (in which the media tells us what to think about), women’s athletics are perceived as being dull and unimportant. But I’m nowhere done with my analysis yet.

Stay tuned because I’m just getting started. In my next post, I’ll discuss the physical differences between men and women and how that is also shaped by the media and agenda-setting.

Works Cited

Agenda Setting theory. (2010). In D. Watts, Dictionary of American government and politics. Edinburg, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Retrieved from http://sinclair.ohionet.org/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/eupamgov/agenda_setting_theory/0?institutionId=6043

Mccombs, Maxwell & Guo, Lei. (2014). The Handbook of Media and Mass Communication Theory. 10.1002/9781118591178.ch14.

Jeffrey Allen Miles, Jossey-Bass. (2012). Management and Organization Theory: A Jossey-Bass Reader. Ch 4