Cheryl Cooky, Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Purdue University -
The Conversation
Though the college career of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark ended with a disappointing loss, the point guard’s record-breaking season helped fuel widespread interest in this year’s NCAA women’s college basketball tournament.
The women’s Final Four garnered higher television ratings than the men’s Final Four. Then the women’s basketball championship game between South Carolina and Iowa didn’t just draw in more viewers (18.9 million) than the men’s championship game the following night (14.8 million); it also had more viewers than every World Series game since Game 7 of the 2019 World Series and every NBA Finals game since Game 5 of the 2017 NBA Finals.
Does this represent another brief moment in the sun for women’s sports? Or will this shining moment extend far into the future?
The media briefly focused on these events, before returning to business as usual: giving men’s sports outsized attention.
But this moment feels different. Many fans, journalists and scholars are wondering if this is the dawn of a new era of women’s sports, with more coverage, increased viewership, heightened interest and bigger investments continuing in the future.
Since 1989, my colleagues and I have been tracking the quantity and quality of coverage of men’s and women’s sports on televised news and highlight shows. Every five years, we collect a new batch of data. We’re in the middle of collecting data for the eighth time, the results of which will be published in 2025. (In 2019, we added online and social media content to our analysis.)
In our samples, we’ve consistently found that women’s sports on televised news and sports highlight shows generally comprise between 3% and 5% of the coverage, measured in minutes and number of stories. Over the years, there have been a few spikes driven by high-profile international sporting events, such as the 1999 Women’s World Cup and the Olympics. The newsletters and social media accounts of the same networks in our sample also mirror the dearth of television coverage, with about 4% to 5% of the content focused on women’s sports.
Our findings are not unique. Hundreds of studies on the routine coverage of sports have similarly found that media coverage of women’s sports rarely exceeds 10% of total sports coverage. This is a recurring pattern across media platforms – print, TV, radio, social – in English-speaking countries.
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