Gender byline bias: how women sports reporters struggle
Current working conditions in sports journalism make it difficult for female sports journalists to compete with men and prevent women from working in sports newsrooms. These are, for example, hostile work environment, harassment in the workplace, and online hate speech which are often targeted at female sports journalists. Consequently, without the support and advancement of women, newsrooms will struggle to diversify their newsrooms, and nothing will change.
These are findings in a study of German sports reporting called “Gender byline bias in sports reporting: Examining the visibility and audience perception of male and female journalists in sports coverage” and written by researchers Karin Boczek, Leyla Dogruel and Christina Schallhorn.
The study shows that audiences see no qualification difference between women and men sports reporters and the conclusion is that newsrooms should actively take measures to diversify their bylines.
“In practice, an equality initiative like the BBC’s 50:50 project has been shown to be effective in terms of making inequalities visible within the newsroom. Until changes such as these are implemented across the board, it is likely that women will continue to be invisible and disadvantaged in sports journalism, even if they have as much expertise and competence as their male colleagues.”
The study says visibility of female reporters as authors in terms of sports coverage has been found to be under 10% in content analysis that spans several countries.
”We found that female authorship in sports journalism is still marginalized without any significant improvement observed from 2006 to 2020. This contrasts with our findings on audiences’ perceptions of male and female authors, which did not confirm a gender byline bias. Our results therefore suggest that gender discrimination in newsrooms cannot be justified by audience perceptions.”
The report says that female sports journalists are a rarity in all countries of the world. A study in 2013 analyzed 80 newspapers in 22 countries, only 8% of articles by sports journalists were written by women. A UK study has shown that in general, the visibility of male sports journalists outnumbered that of female sports journalists at a ratio of just over 43:1 (only 2.3% were women).
”It turns out that women in sports journalism are not only in the minority but also that female role models in sports journalism simply do not exist.”
In the United States, sports editors were interviewed about their sports department staff. Only about two-thirds of their respondents stated that at least one woman worked in their sports departments.
”These international findings confirm that sports journalism is “one of the most masculine journalistic universes” .
The German study found a tendency towards gender-congruent reporting; women authors report significantly more often on women’s than on men’s football. The ratio of female authors is 49% for women’s football articles versus 8% for all football articles. And data did not point to an increase in the ratio of women reporting on sports in general—or on football or women’s football in particular—over the period from 2006 to 2020.
The study summarizes that a key question is why the proportion of female journalists in sport stagnates at a low level over 15 years.
“It is likely that male sports journalists of higher professional ranking often decide which tasks are fulfilled by whom, with a preference for men. The consequence could be that these leading sports journalists tend to give more important positions and jobs to men. Conversely, women report more often on women’s sport as such sports are generally considered less prestigious due to lower audience interest compared to men’s sports.”
”Following this logic, reporting on women’s sports means reporting on less important sports. These observations show why male sports journalists cover all kinds of sports, whereas females are often restricted to reporting on women’s or less prestigious sports.
”Audiences’ perceptions, by contrast, do not seem to favour men authors in sports reporting. Our findings therefore do not point to a negative bias against female authors. However, we detected an interaction effect regarding readers’ gender: women were likely to attribute less expertise to female journalists writing about male football, while for men this was not the case.”
The study argues that this might be a result of sexism unknowingly internalized by women, because they are used to seeing other women on television portrayed as less competent or in inferior job positions as men.
”In that way, women learn from an early age from the media—and thus, they more or less adopt unconsciously—that men are superior to women. Also, possibly a (mis)attribution of females’ own low expertise in the sports context to female sports journalists may taking place here. This makes it even more important that women receive higher visibility in sports journalism—especially in popular sports, such as men’s football—so that they become the norm and are not regarded as a less competent minority that has to face prejudices and objectivation. Otherwise sport will remain a field of heteronormative masculinity.”
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