Are reader biases responsible for gender disparities in sports reporting? This study says no » Nieman Journalism Lab

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That sports media fights against diversity and prejudice is nothing new. Just a few months ago, a report by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida found that in the United States and Canada, only 19% of positions in the sports journalism are occupied by women.

But now, a longitudinal study looking at signatures over 15 years reveals that not only are women underrepresented, they’re not even gaining much ground. And readers aren’t the only ones to blame.

A few caveats from the outset: the study only looked at articles from one newspaper – Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung – between 2006 and 2020. The findings may therefore be generalizable to other media or broadcast media. . He also focused almost exclusively on football. And finally, the study does not appear to include non-binary or trans people in its examination of gender differences.

The researchers – Karin Boczek, Leyla Dogruel and Christiana Schallhorn – examined almost 42,000 sports articles published during the study window. They found that only 8.2% of articles were written by a woman or a team of women. Men wrote almost 92% of sports articles, with less than 0.1% of articles having both men and women in the byline.

The numbers were similar when the authors only looked at articles about football (or, as the Germans call it, Fußball). It was only in the coverage of women’s football where there was something like parity, with roughly equal male and female signings.

The authors didn’t even find that the numbers improved significantly over the duration of the study. The ratio of sports articles written by women bottomed out at 5% in 2016 but never exceeded 11% (2019), for a 15-year average of around 8%. The same was true for articles dealing specifically with football. And even among stories about women’s football, the highest proportion of bylines featuring women was 82%, with the lowest at 26%. Overall, this averaged around 50% over the 15-year study period.

So why are the sports sections so stubbornly masculine? One theory holds that it’s the public’s fault – that readers prefer their sportswriters to be male. The study cites previous research that found that male sportswriters have consistently been perceived as more credible and competent by the public.

The authors conducted a small survey of 635 participants (56% of whom were men). Volunteers were able to preview an opinion piece on sport. Some saw the play with a female photo and a columnist, others with a man. Some people showed it as a story about the German women’s national soccer team, others the men’s team. It looked like this:

Respondents were asked to indicate their interest in reading the article, as well as their perception of the story’s author’s credibility, based solely on the information provided so far. The researchers controlled for variables such as participants’ interest in football, age, gender and level of education, as well as affinity for right-wing authoritarian politics (which the authors say showed an influence on gender attitudes).

What they found was that the gender of the byline had no significant effect – on the reader’s desire to keep reading or on their perception of the writer’s expertise.

Interestingly, there were differences that depended on the gender of the readers. Women were less likely than men to be interested in a story about men’s football – but for stories about women’s football there was no gender gap in interest levels. Women, on average, rated the expertise of female journalists lower than that of male journalists. But men tended to rate the expertise of male and female sports journalists equally.

What does all this mean? Public perception alone cannot explain the historical and persistent exclusion of women from sports journalism. Female readers seem quite ready to read and value the work of female sports journalists. The authors call for specific equity investments – such as the BBC’s 50:50 project – to diversify signings. “Until such changes are implemented at all levels, it is likely that women will continue to be invisible and disadvantaged in sports journalism, despite having as much expertise and skill as their colleagues. male,” they wrote.

You can read the full study here.

Photo of German football fans by Stewart is under a Creative Commons license.

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