Sports in Mass Media

Typically, there is a gender divide in everything we do, whether or not we want one. Wages, job promotions, and benefits may be just some examples of women being the minority. Have you ever thought about the sporting industry, because the fact of the matter is that the gender divide in sports is huge. I know, it must be hard to complain when it seems like you are making 8.5 million dollars a year in salary alone. The truth is however, female athletes don’t even come close to competing with their male counterparts. This is also true in regards to the media aspect of their jobs. Media coverage of women athletes tends to be limited and therefore undermines and silences their efforts and success. “The role of media, especially the portrayal of men and women with regard to how sport is presented as a socially constructed reality in the ongoing construction of gender, has been discussed in several research papers. The majority of this work has shown the dissimilar and unequal ways in which men and women athletes have been pictured (Koivula 2)”

. Media coverage of women in sports is significantly lower than the coverage of men athletes. “In 1994, for example, men were found to receive 93.8 percent of television coverage on US television” (Bernstein 2). Many researchers have argued that sports more than any other social organization signifies male superiority and female inferiority. The total coverage for “women’s” sports is not only less televised, the coverage time is a lot shorter. If a women’s sporting program does happen to make it on television, the coverage time is less than half of their male counterparts. “Analyses of the western media conducted over the past 20 years have discovered consistent patterns of low coverage and inconsistent quality in women’s sport, particularly in everyday sports reporting “(Bruce and Wensing 1). Although many studies of this issue are conducted in America, it is important to note that this is a global issue.

“This underrepresentation, in turn, is also viewed as creating a vicious circle since the growth of women’s sport is hindered by the lack of funds which nowadays come primarily from sponsorship. Since sponsors are interested in investing in sports and teams which feature regularly on television and women’s sports do not qualify as such, they do not get big cash injections” (Bernstein). Female wages in the sport industry barely crack $500,00 dollars annually, whereas men are receiving multi-million dollar contracts every day. Like Bernstein said, women athletes then rely on sponsorships to bring in extra money. However that becomes a problem when companies want to sponsor people who are well known and televised, meaning that male athletes get the majority of sponsorships and partnerships. Sponsors focus on the popular athletes as they are the ones who bring in fans and viewers, mass global coverage, and in-house, television, print and online