Women’s sports still ignored by many papers

Coming on the heels of its first study, “Gender Stereotyping in Televised Sports,” the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles has released a second report: “Coverage of Women’s Sports in Four Daily Newspapers.”

The papers studied were the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News, USA Today and the Orange County Register, chosen by the Associated Press Sports Editors in 1990 as four of the top 10 daily sports sections in the country.

Co-investigators were Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Michael Messner, Ph.D., University of Southern California, and Linda Williams, Ph.D.

Anita L. DeFrantz, president of the AAFLA, reports, “As was the case with the television study, we have found that women’s sports are extraordinarily underreported. And, as was the case with television, we feel that this situation is wrong and must change.”

DeFrantz does comment specifically on USA Today. “That paper’s coverage of women’s sports, as measured in a variety of ways, was more thorough than that which existed in each of the other three papers. USA Today’s example indicated that a paper can indeed cover women’s sports without fear of reducing circulation or reader interest.”

Criteria used to judge the papers included: the number of stories; the length of stories measured in column inches; the page placement of stories; the number of photographs; and the number of stories accompanied by photographs.

The papers were examined from July to September during which golf and tennis, two sports in which women have a long tradition of world-class competition, were at the height of their seasons. The time frame also included the Goodwill Games and the U.S. Olympic Festival, which featured hundreds of female athletes, and several national and international competitions involving female athletes, but resulted in only 301 women-only articles.

The summary of the findings were as follows: (1) stories focusing exclusively on men’s sports outnumbered stories addressing only women’s sports by a ratio of 32-1. (2) Even when all men’s baseball and football stories were eliminated from the total number of men’s stories, men’s stories still outnumbered women’s stories by an 8.7 to 1 margin. (3) Women-only sports stories accounted for 3.5 percent of all stories; men’s stories made up 81 percent of the total. (4) Front page stories covering only women’s sports were even more scarce, comprising 3.2 percent of page one articles, compared to 85.3 percent devoted exclusively to men’s coverage.

Item 5: There were 28.8 times as many column inches devoted to men-only sports stories as there were to women-only sports stories. (6) Photographs of male athletes outnumbered those of female athletes 13-1. (7) 92.3 percent of all photographs were pictures of men. (8) In each newspaper, fewer than 5 percent of all stories were devoted to women only. USA Today, however, provided a significantly higher number of women’s stories and women’s photographs than any of the other newspapers. –

COMMENTARY: Since 1979, the Bangor Daily NEWS, which publishes six days a week, has featured this daily column on girls and women in sports and, over the years, has steadily improved its coverage of girls and women’s sporting events. We are particularly proud of our interscholastic girls tournament basketball coverage, which is equal to the coverage we give the boys tournaments. And while we recognize we still have much more work to do, it is obvious to me that we are doing a better job than even those sports sections who are considered among the best in our field.