The Sorry Status of Gender in Televised Sports

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 guaranteed - amongst other things - protection from gender discrimination in collegiate sports. Yet nearly 40 years since its enactment, one would hard pressed to find evidence of its impact by watching televised sports. A new study released by the Center for Feminist Research reveals gross inequities in the coverage of gender among the major broadcast networks and ESPN. For example, while both the men's and women's NCAA (i.e., collegiate) Basketball tournament occur during the same temporal frame, a six week analysis of media coverage revealed that the men's NCAA tournament garnered nearly 1 1/2 hours of evening news coverage (sports segment) while the women's NCAA tournament received no coverage. Meanwhile, while ESPN devoted some 56 story segments to men's collegiate basketball, only 7 stories were devoted to women's collegiate basketball. And coverage of gender in professional sports fared no better - with the WNBA almost absent from television screens, making way instead for coverage of Laker girl tryouts, a story about bras for women golfers, and other frivolous coverage of gender in sports. We'll take a closer look at the newly published report Gender In Televised Sports and we'll speak with one of the principal investigators, Professor Michael Messner (University of Southern California.) We'll also try to get a response from newsroom sports desks.