Tennis Body’s Gender Equality Report is a Grand Slap to the Media, asking to improve its coverage of women’s sports!
It comes as no surprise that we lived in a gender-biased society. This bias has permeated in all aspects of life, and sports and media are no exception. When you Google “Top 50 tennis players,” a list of names appears, with the majority of them being male. Only 6/50 search results are women. The first page has ranking articles of only the male tennis players with female athletes added to the related search section at the bottom. You have to specifically type in “female/women” tennis players as the keywords in there to get the relevant results. This hypocrisy of the media that the search engine covers was recently revealed in the tennis body’s gender equality report.
The April 2021 research titled “ Exploring sports gender equality in the media,” concluded that “absolute volume of online conversations is consistently and much higher for male tennis players than for female tennis players”. Terms like “G.O.A.T” (Greatest of All Time) and “making history” were mentioned 50% and 40% more in men’s content than women’s, respectively.
It also states that the “conversation and coverage of men’s tennis is more focused on the sport, with a strong combative narrative and a sense of history, elite competition and achievement whereas the conversation around women’s tennis is less intense and relatively more focused on life off the court, from health and age to family, framing tennis as one facet.” Even there’s 2x mention of women athletes’ health and medical treatment, the reason of which is beyond our understanding. They glorify male athletes with battle terminology while demeaning female athletes with references to their skin color. The subject of race has no bearing on athlete’s performance whatsoever, but still, the research found that there are 11 times as many mentions in women’s tennis as there are in men’s.
And this is the story of all the sports. From tennis, football, to cricket, and golf, etc., it’s a real challenge for us to name even the famous women athletes in these sports. But we can easily name the male athletes of the sports we barely have any idea about. I know, I can. This is because the media doesn’t bother to cover their accomplishments and we don’t have the time or interest to google about them. It’s not as if female athletes aren’t succeeding or bringing medals for their countries. It’s just that their accomplishments go unnoticed amid the meaningless news items about their physical appearance, beauty, age, relationships, and so on.
This gender bias by the media pushes female athletes and their achievements to the sidelines. They are ranked primarily based on their sex appeal and desirability, with less emphasis placed on their performance in their respective fields. How many times have we come across articles such as “Top 10 sexiest women in __ (sport)?” These articles are published by the media organization as they gain more traction, depicting the type of content that the audience is actually interested in. The quest for likes, comments, and views leads them to write more such content. Amidst this, they often overlook the topics that truly matter.
According to Peter Hutton, head of sports at Facebook, search engine optimization for women’s sports can be improved by changing the data that goes into them. “If you look at what search engines do, they basically reflect society. That’s how they’re supposed to operate. If you manually change search engines, then you open yourself up to other accusations of bias as well…. I think the importance is encouraging organisations, individuals federations to put out more women stories to encourage the media outlets to put out more stories, and that inevitably will change the search results,” he says, as reported by The Indian Express. We say the times are changing, and women are being given more recognition for their accomplishments, but the report from ITF tells a different story. They called out the media on their bias by analyzing the content online as well on several social media channels. A small piece of article on the last page of the sports section doesn’t count for recognition. The study was released in mid-April, but currently, we don’t see much change on the google search engine.
We hope the media organizations learn a lesson from the points published in the report. They need to take a stand and cover female athletes in the same light as men. They need to seriously work on both the quality and quantity of the women’s sports media coverage. And as a reader, let’s give the female players the equal respect and appreciation they are worthy of by engaging in their stories of feats. After all, they have put in the same amount of hard work in their training and performance and even more, for which they deserve due credit. Also, let’s be vocal about the biases as and when we encounter them.
Recently, the Indian women boxers made history by securing seven gold medals each in the 2021 AIBA Youth Championship. Read this blog here.
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Originally published at https://www.fuzia.com.