Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Even after their achievements sports organisations, stereotypes like “women are weak” have fueled the gender based discrimination within the domain of sports which further reflected in the coverage of sportswomen in print media and the kind of language that has been used to write about them. We live in the world which is constructed along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, class and religion. Media plays an important role in engraving gender roles and values in the minds of the people. Communication is important for sports because not everyone can go and watch the sports live in the field so most of the people prefer reading about it or watching it through media. That is the reason “mediated sports” plays an important role in the career of the sportswomen. There is gender gap in the portrayal of women in media because of the media frame that is used to report or write about sportswomen. The aim of this research is to discuss the reasons of gender inequity in sports. Further it aims to discuss the role of print media in maintaining sports as a masculine domain and the language media uses to write about sportswomen. I analyse the effect of the portrayal of sportswomen by media on it readers. The research will be conducted through discourse analysis method by analyzing the newspaper articles of three national dailies and by conducting interviews of sportswomen, coaches, journalists and newspaper readers.