Women's Sport Is Not Under-represented in the Media

Women don’t get much coverage in sports, and apparently lots of people, not just women, are miffed by this. Sexism may be a factor, but it is far from the most dominant. There are two big factors that ensure that women’s sport has far smaller viewing figures than male sport: firstly, women are really bad at sports compared to men, and as a consequence there is less skill on show; secondly women are far less interested in sports than men and like to watch women’s sport just as much as men, i.e. not at all.

Women are bad at sports in comparison with men. This sounds damning, and it is, but not because the sentence is constructed in an uncompromising way; no, it’s damning because it’s true. Women are equals in terms of intelligence, ambition, artistic ability and a million other things, but not when it comes to sport. No one feels the need to defend the male Black Widow spider because he’s so inferior in size and strength to the female, and it’s the same situation in humans, albeit in a less exaggerated scale.  Women’s sport  is a poorer product. Wimbledon is an excellent point of comparison. The women are athletic, talented and committed, and their games do have drama. Yet, the men’s tournament is even more dramatic. They play for longer; the extra length means fatigue and fitness plays a bigger role, allowing for bigger swings in momentum. They hit harder and more accurately, and run faster for longer. Hence, bigger viewing figures. This is the case in all sport, but is most clearly outlined in tennis, in which men and women both receive equal billing.  

This is a legitimate case for preferring men’s sport, and there is no reason to feel guilty about it. There is no obligation to like or to pretend to like something that we don’t, or can’t be bothered with. There’s no expectation that we give bad films a fair shout (although, worryingly, bad films often dominate the box office so maybe that isn’t the best example). The under-16 age group is even more unfairly represented in the media than women’s sport. The England U-16 boys football team would beat the senior women’s team, and sometimes do well internationally, yet they get zero airtime. Where’s the fairness in that? No one complains about that, even though all the arguments for the increase in airtime for women’s sports could be copy and pasted into an argument supporting the increase in airtime for U-16 sports.

The amount of coverage designated to news outlets is in line with the popularity of the sport: the Premier League has the highest viewing figures in terms of live and television audiences; Ultimate Frisbee gets no attention because no one watches it. Television figures are the important numbers (because they’re higher) but the popularity of a sport stems from the size of the live audience. At Old Trafford, home of Manchester United, the best men’s team in the country, the weekly 75 000 strong audience dictates that football gets a lot of coverage. At Meadow Park, the 4 502-person capacity stadium that is home of Arsenal Ladies F.C, the best women’s team in the country that can boast Kelly Smith, the world’s best player, ‘attendances for most home matches are in the hundreds’ (Wikipedia). The question is this: ladies, if you want women’s sport on television, and this football example is as good as any, shouldn’t you go and watch it live, first? If the best women’s team in the country, situated just outside the biggest city in Europe, cannot find four and a half thousand women to watch them play, why should T.V controllers and media outlets designate money into areas that interest effectively nobody? They shouldn’t, so they don’t. The women’s sport that does get strong attendances is tennis, and it is no coincidence that women’s tennis does get attention from the media. Athletics and cycling do as well, because loads of people watch the Olympics, and to a lesser extent the World Championships. This is simple supply and demand.

 The subtext in the lamentation that the media don’t pay enough attention to women is sport is really that men don’t pay enough attention to women in sport. Far more men go to watch live sport than women, and there is no obligation for them to watch women’s sport. If women can draw in large crowds of women to watch them perform, then sponsors would get interested and push advertising and push the media to cover the sport more. It is not the responsibility of the sport-watching men to drag women’s sport up from the poor table, it’s the responsibility of the women.