Welcome back to Volleyball By The Numbers! This is the second post on my research project on the representation of female athletes in the media. If you haven’t seen my first post, you can check it out here! In this post we’ll get into the context of how female athletes have been underrepresented in the media, its increasing popularity in the past decade, and which specific sports have been driving this surge of interest. Let’s get into it!
It is a commonly known fact that female athletes have not been given the same media platforms or representation as their male counterparts. But did you know that, historically, most analyses find that coverage of female athletes in the US sports news media has varied between 3% and 5%? That is way lower than I had guessed when I first started my research. Usually, coverage of female athletes takes off around events like the Olympics, and then quickly tapers off after the events end.
I know this is kind of a bummer, but I’m here to share some good news: there has been a huge increase in the coverage of female athletes! A study funded by ESPN, and conducted by the Wasserman Collective, found that in the last ten years, the amount of coverage of female athletes has tripled (obviously 15% is not ideal, but progress is progress)!
In my research, I focused on digital sports media coverage over the past decade. My research analyzed more than 5000 of the top stories from three of the biggest sports media websites from 2015 through 2024 (more on the methodology here). I found a similar trend, as you can see in the graph below.
Let’s take a deeper look into the three media websites I analyzed: NCAA, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated. Looking at them you can see pretty different patterns:
As we can see, coverage of female athletes increased across all three websites. NCAA started with higher levels of coverage than ESPN or Sports Illustrated in 2015, but their coverage of women’s sports was still only 12% in my sample. For ESPN and Sports Illustrated, their coverage was less than 4% in 2015. Recently, coverage of female athletes has increased to about a third on NCAA, to more than 10% on ESPN, and to between 5 and 10% on Sports Illustrated. Overall, across all three sources, the coverage of female athletes was nearly twice as high in the most recent five years than it was in 2015-2019, which is a statistically significant difference.
Now let’s focus on which sports have been driving this surge in coverage:
Volleyball has clearly increased over time, but the driving factor has been basketball! Here is the comparison of men’s versus women’s basketball over the last ten years:
Naturally, since this is a volleyball website, let’s take a closer look at volleyball:
Overall, it is great to see that coverage of female athletes has tripled, but there is still a long way to go.
Of course, it is also important to analyze not just the amount of the coverage, but also the quality of the coverage. How are female athletes being portrayed, and how has that changed overtime? That is what part 3 of this series will focus on, so stay tuned!
Data Notes:
- Photo Credit: American University Athletics
- A more complete discussion of the methodology behind my research is written up here. The project involved coding thousands of top articles from sports media websites, and also more detailed coding of photographs of more than six hundred pictures of female athletes in those articles. You can find out more on my analysis of the visual representation of female athletes in Part 3 of the series!
- My own research focused on coverage and representation of female athletes in stories and pictures on sports media websites, but the Wasserman Collective report found similar trends in social media, both streaming and more traditional TV sports coverage, and a wide variety of other news sources.
- As with a lot of the data analysis on this website, some of the trends over the past decade in this project were complicated a bit by Covid. NCAA.com sports coverage patterns were more disrupted by Covid than ESPN or SI, not surprisingly.