Over the course of the past nine months, as part of my AP Research class, I developed a major research project focused on the representation of female athletes in the sports media. I read dozens of academic articles, more actively followed sports media coverage of female athletes across a wide range of sports, and talked to a lot of athletes, fans, and coaches about the representation of female athletes in the sports media.
Two key points came across in my early exploration of the topic. First, coverage of female athletics has traditionally been fairly limited in major sports media–and what limited coverage that has existed has often involved problematic or biased representation of female athletes. Second, some of this may be changing. There are many new stories flagging recent increases in television coverage and viewership of female sports in the US (most prominently in basketball, but also clearly for other sports like volleyball as well), and the Wasserman Collective published more systematic research finding that overall coverage of female sports may have tripled in recent years.
However, while the evidence is out there about the increase in coverage of women’s sports, I was able to find little to nothing that examines whether the biases in that nature of the coverage of female athletes has also changed. When I dug into the research, there was a great deal of concern about biases in the visual representation of female athletes. Research showed that, in contrast with male athletes, the visual representation of female athletes had less emphasis on athletic achievement, and greater focus on their physical appearance, femininity, and/or sexuality. Ultimately, if media coverage of female athletes remains problematic, should we really be celebrating the increase in coverage as much as we have been?
My central research question for this project over the past nine months became: With the recent increase in media coverage of women’s sports, how has the photographic representation of female athletes in digital sports news media changed over the past ten years?
To systematically look at the change in how female athletes have been portrayed over the past ten years, I knew I would need to look at a lot of photos from multiple media sources, and that I would need to develop a plan for how to find these photos. I decided to collect photos from three online sports media sites every tenth day for 10 years. There was a lot that went into that decision.
I decided to focus on sports websites because they are the main way people consume sports news, and I wanted to build on the previous literature. I also had to decide which websites to analyze. I chose Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and NCAA because each has a large viewership, and represents a different part of the sports media market.
- ESPN is the most visited sports news media website in the US and globally, with an emphasis on covering professional sports.
- NCAA is the official website of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the governing body for most collegiate sports in the United States. Due to the success of Title IX, there is greater gender equality in collegiate sports participation and interest than there is in professional sports.
- Sports Illustrated is the most studied sports media outlet in the research I reviewed, and the research found that Sports Illustrated’s visual imagery has disproportionately objectified female athletes, especially in its swimsuit issues.
I was able to access historical versions of the three websites through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which makes copies of each of the sites multiple times each day.
Next, I had to figure out a sampling strategy. I wanted to get a long enough time range to be able to identify patterns. Given data availability in the Internet Archive, coding articles from the past 10 years was feasible. It would not have been feasible to code all three sites every day for ten years, or to code every article on each website. I decided instead to code the top five articles on each website, for every tenth day around 8am Eastern Time. I chose ten days because that meant I had variation in days of the week, which is important because sports coverage varies by day of the week. I tried to collect the photos around 6am Eastern Time because that is the typical start of the morning news cycle.
In the end, my dataset included 1,825 articles from each of the three sites, for a total of 5,475 articles.
Of these articles, 650 featured female athletes. NCAA had the most, with 461 articles. ESPN had 111 articles. And Sports Illustrated had the least, with only 78 articles. Once I gathered my photos, I developed a set of coding strategies, building on coding strategies used in the academic literature (particularly Wasike 2020; Devonport, Leflay, and Russell 2019; Wolter 2015; and Emmons and Mocarski 2014).
I also tested my coding rules with my fellow students in my AP Research class, assessed intercoder reliability, and refined my coding based on their feedback. 11% of visuals showed up as gray on the Wayback Machine’s site, and while I could tell what the article was about, I could not code the image. A majority of the gray images were videos, however, and thus rightly should be excluded from the study.
I coded each photo based on 6 categories
- How many people were in the visual.
- What they were wearing.
- How much of the athletes’ bodies were in the picture.
- Whether the image captures an in-game action shot; occurred on game day, but not during game play; or whether it was posed.
- Whether or not it was a sexual pose, and
- Whether the athletes’ facial expressions were smiling, neutral, or intense.
These are what my codes look like in my dataset:
The photo in the upper right was coded as 2 athletes wearing athletic attire, full body, action, non-sexual, with intense facial expressions.
The photo in the bottom right was coded as 3+ athletes, wearing athletic attire, partial body, on game day, non-sexual, with smiling facial expressions.
Ultimately, my collection and coding of 5,475 articles and 650 photographs of female athletes from the top stores on sports media websites provided a rich set of data to explore the representation of female sports and athletes in the sports media. More about the findings of my research can be found in my series of posts of The Rising Popularity of Women’s Sports (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).