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| Poet Ian McMillan had an inspired idea and talked Barnsley Football Club into helping him to achieve his goal. Here he talks about being the first poet-in-residence at a British football club. |
| Jim Sells from the Literacy Trust is manager of the Reading the Game project that aims to get young people into books through their love of football. Further details of that initiative can be found here. |
| Tim Parks has written on sport in both his fiction and non-fiction. Here he explores the dramatic impact of sporting thrills and spills in literature. |
| The British Council in Germany recently ran a project profiling football and literature. Here, British Council organiser Marijke Brouwer talks about the impact of this stunning event while writer Chris Dolan explains what it all meant to him. |
| Will Buckley and Sarah Wardle are both keen football fans and here explore this great British obsession. Will talks about how it is reflected in our literature generally while Sarah takes on football, poetry and fiction. |
| Sports journalism in the UK is in a great state. The broadsheets are producing their own supplements, the tabloids have some fantastic writers and even the fanzines are going strong. Kevin Mitchell looks at exactly where it's at. Meanwhile Hunter Davies offers an overview of footballing biographies and how they have changed over the years. |
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The Representation of Women in Sports Journalism |
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Although some may argue that sport and politics aren’t a comfortable mix, in the end it’s hard to keep the two separate. Liz Crolley explores issues around women in sports writing.
Sport often dominates not only the back pages of newspapers, but the front and those in between too. Interested or not, we cannot avoid it. We read about football, cricket, rugby, horse racing - but how often do we see women lead the sports headlines?
Women have traditionally been under-represented in the global sports media in terms of the amount of coverage dedicated to women’s sport compared to men’s. There have also been differences in the ways in which women’s and men’s sports are reported. Traditional connotations of femininity (grace and beauty) conflict with the attributes associated with most sports in the press (competitiveness and power). This served for a long time to reinforce the supremacy of male-dominated sport and to perpetuate traditional gender stereotypes. Indeed, it has been argued that sport remains one of the last bastions of masculinity.
There clearly remain inequalities between males and females in terms of participation in sport at all levels. However, in recent years women have made huge progress in breaking into the domain. Perhaps the most obvious example is reflected in coverage of the Olympic Games.
The Olympics have come a long way from their position in 1896 when women were not allowed to compete at all (and from 1900 when just 20 females out of 1000 competitors participated in Paris). Participation of women in the Olympics gradually increased during the second half of the 20th century (it never represented more than 10% of the total number of athletes before then), and then in Athens 2004, women competed in all sports with the exception of baseball (softball for women) and boxing. For the first time, the percentage of women taking part reached above 40%. It is interesting to examine the extent to which these changes are reflected in the amount and nature of sports journalism.
Sport is undoubtedly and overwhelmingly constructed in the mass media as a male domain, with professional male sport at the pinnacle of sporting value. Media coverage of male and female athletes has differed widely in several ways. There are two key ways in which this is done: the amount of coverage and the nature of the coverage.
As we might expect, column space in the press dedicated to men’s sports exceeds that devoted to women’s. In this way, the sports media has contributed to prolonging inequalities between male and female sports via its lack of coverage: women are excluded almost entirely in some sports (and at some times of the year). This distorts the public image of male/female sports and gives the (false) perception that women’s role in sport is marginal at best.
The Olympic Games provides us with an arena where women’s presence is stronger perhaps than any other, at any other time of the year. We might expect, given that the Olympic Games is one occasion when the number of participants are more equally balanced between men and women, that media coverage is distributed relatively equally between the sexes. This is certainly not the case. It is not unusual in the press of Western European countries for coverage of men’s events to outweigh that of women’s events with a ratio of 8:1. Furthermore, articles on men’s events are more prominent - in larger font and generally occupying the majority of the headlines and lead stories. Women’s events often consist of a sentence at the end of an article on the men’s events.
There has been an improvement in the amount of space dedicated to the coverage of women’s sport in the press (the Women’s World Cup, which took place in the north-west of England in June this year was covered in the ‘serious’ newspapers every day), and there are fewer articles in serious newspapers that are overtly sexist. However, disparities exist in the nature of the coverage of male and female sport.
The press is guilty of covering certain female sports in greater depth than others. The sports where women receive greater coverage are often those that lend themselves better to reinforcing the feminine sporting image of grace and beauty (gymnastics, figure-skating and swimming rather than those that involve face-to-face opposition, body contact, moving heavy objects).
Various aspects of coverage are significant in that they highlight the different approaches to covering male and female athletes in the print media. ‘Asymmetrical gender marking’ (of people and events) is common. This is when sportsmen and sportswomen are addressed differently. The most common practice is for men to be referred to by their last name (e.g. Gerrard) and women either by both first name and last names (e.g. Kelly Holmes) or by first name only (e.g. Kelly). Men’s events are generally unmarked (‘the basketball team’ is the men’s team) whereas women’s events are always marked (the women’s basketball team).
The type of information reported about women can differ from that about men: newspaper features on women (when they exist - they are actually few and far between) often focus on their home and family life, while those on men tend to cover their training and former sporting achievements. A woman’s emotional state is more likely to be discussed than a man’s.
Finally, an analysis of the photographs published can reveal some extraordinary differences. While most photographs of both men and women are usually action shots, and comparable in nature, it is still not usual to see contrasting shots of women taken with a soft lens, where the women are scantily clad, in a suggestive pose, full make-up, even lips slightly apart, focussing on the artistry, grace, pose and beauty of the subject. There are very few shots of men that are not action shots.
There are, of course, exceptions to all this, and there is plenty of evidence of progress toward equal representation of men and women in the press. Women’s achievements are no longer trivialised; they are taken seriously. Ellen Macarthur’s exploits around the world in her yacht have received coverage worthy of the achievement. The pity is that it takes such great achievements by a woman to break the male domination.
Liz Crolley is part of the Football Industry Group based at the University of Liverpool. |
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