Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

While the percentage of female athletes in the Olympics has been increasing, and women are now able to compete in more events than ever before, women still do not make up a full 50 percent of participants. Feminist sports media scholars have suggested that this lack of representation, and the corresponding lack of media coverage for the athletes competing, reinforces the idea of the female athlete as “other,” a secondary class of participants in a male-dominated space. This study aims to assess how the media coverage of Olympic sportswomen in The Times (UK) and The Sunday Times (UK) has changed over the course of the last three Olympics, 2008, 2012 and 2016 to determine if equality has been reached in the press. Articles, photographs and bylines were assessed as a way to measure the representation of women in the sports section of these two papers during the three Olympic periods. The findings reveal that media coverage of Olympic sportswomen in The Times and The Sunday Times has not reach equality across any measures from 2008 to 2016. The percentage of articles devoted to women and bylines produced by women in The Times and The Sunday Times did not increase across the three Olympic periods, with both bylines by women and articles about women reaching their highest percentage in 2012. Photographs of sportswomen in action, another marker of women’s representation, however did increase from 2008 to 2016, suggesting a shift toward visually highlighting female athleticism in Olympic media.