This is courtesy of the Women’s Sports Foundation:
Female Athletes In (And Out Of) Print
Tue 11-Sep-2007
New study shows female athletes are overlooked by popular ESPN The Magazine
Sports and the media share a very powerful, important relationship. If the Williams sisters had never been featured on SportsCenter, would they be as well-known as they are today? If newspapers didn’t cover last night’s Yankee game on the front page, would we know who the new up-and-coming star was? Would we care? Absolutely not. Sports coverage draws in viewers and fuels sales of newspapers and magazines, while media coverage creates awareness of certain sports and athletes. However, this is only a beneficial relationship for the sports and athletes that are featured by the media.
A 2002 study found that Sports Illustrated, the world’s largest general-interest sport magazine, provided only 10% of its coverage to female athletes. As female athletes continue to struggle to gain the notoriety and respect of today’s male athletes, researchers from Indiana University-Bloomington set out to study ESPN The Magazine, one of Sports Illustrated’s biggest competitors, to see if it, too, provided inadequate coverage of women’s sports. Andrea N. Eagleman and Paul M. Pedersen found that the magazine provides only 3% of its written coverage and 5% of photographic coverage to female athletes. ESPN The Magazine provides significantly less coverage of female athletes than Sports Illustrated, therefore perpetuating the cycle of denying female athletes the same promotional benefits of their male counterparts.
