Where are our women? And what are they wearing?

The absence of female athletes from our TV screens deserves more attention. Television is the making of modern athletes. All internationally recognised athletes started out as players for their local club. They have become famous because they have graced our screens. Barely anyone would have heard of Usain Bolt if the 100m sprint wasn’t televised internationally.  With the global influence of social media now becoming apparent, every want-to-be athlete is praying for a big break on TV that will make them famous. Unfortunately this charitable service does not extend to female athletes as television networks rarely broadcast women’s sports.

On free to air TV, it was recently recorded that men receive on average 8 hours and 54 minutes a day and women receive 7 hours and 18 minutes a day. These figures suggest that there is not a huge difference between male sport’s coverage and female sport’s coverage, however these figures were compiled during the Women’s FIFA World Cup. If we take the World Cup out of the equation, women only receive 1 hour and 42 minutes a day. This means men receive just over six times the amount of TV coverage that women receive. Not only do female athletes receive a fraction of the TV time that male athletes get, but only one channel, SBS, broadcasts women’s sports. Furthermore, only three sports that female athletes compete in are broadcast: soccer, netball and surfing.  A recent report released by the Australian Sport Commission found that women receive only 7.4% of all sports programming. “To put this into context,” the report said, “horse racing received more air time than women’s sports in Australian television news.” This marks a decline in the coverage of women’s sports; a decade ago coverage was around 11%.  

Paid TV Foxtel, which has 13 dedicated sports channels, gives female athletes 3 hours and 24 minutes a day. Male athletes receive 62 hours and 20 minutes a day. Although Foxtel has doubled the airtime of female sports, they have increased the gap between the amount of TV coverage males receive compared to females.

Foxtel, who claim to offer an unparalleled coverage of live sports in Australia, should be making the effort to get rid of the gap, not increase it.

This problem, however, is not isolated to Australia, it is an international crisis. The Olympics, which are supposed to celebrate athletes’ achievements from all over the world, are denying women equal air time. Researchers analysing the 2002 Winter Olympics found that men received almost twice as much coverage as women did, with male athletes receiving more than 6 and a half hours of coverage more than the female athletes. This gender gap was larger than in the coverage of the five previous games. Not only are women being left with very little screen time, but the time they have focuses on sports that are considered ‘feminine’. A study by the UNC on the Beijing Games found that of all the prime time women’s coverage, 60% was dedicated to sports considered to be ‘feminine’: gymnastics, swimming and diving.

If beach volleyball is included, whose popularity is widely thought to be driven in part by its sex appeal, the figure rises to 75%. Most alarmingly, however, if events that require women to compete in the equivalent of a bathing suit are included, the figure rises to 97%. Commentators from the Sochi Games are also under fire for repeatedly calling competitors in the women’s ski halfpipe ‘girls’. This provoked a twitter backlash, with one user writing, “Somebody please teach the folks at @NBCOlympics the difference between girls and women. A 29 y.o. skier with kids and a bar is not a girl.” Another user wrote, “You wouldn’t call the men ‘boys’ so please stop calling the women ‘girls’”. Although a lot of the blame for the gender gap between male and female athletes is given to the television networks the solution really lies in the hands of society. Television networks broadcast shows they think will give them the largest audience. Television feels that the public, especially male sports fans, are only interested in women’s sports if the athletes wear next to nothing and ‘look good’. Television is not alone with this view, as former FIFA President Sepp Blatter suggested in 2004: “They [women] could for example wear tighter shorts” to make the game more appealing to men”, adding: “Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball”. The crux of this issue lies in how the majority of men view women’s sports. Unless the attitude that women must ‘look good’ and ‘sexy’ in order for the sport to appeal to men changes, female athletes are set to endure everlasting sexism in sport.