Tansits Week 7 Post - Kian

As our weeks studying sports journalism and its transformation throughout the past century continue, it's obvious that one of the most pressing issues over the past 30 years has been that of diversity. Diversity in sports coverage, diversity in sports media content producers and diversity in the stories themselves. Along with racial diversity, gender diversity is a heavily scrutinized and studied area of sports newsroom production and content. In Kian’s Gender In Sports Writing By The Print Media: An Exploratory Examination Of Writers’ Experiences And Attitudes, the lack of diversity in sports media is discussed in terms of studies and what the results of the cited studies yielded.

In Kian’s writing, he refers to a homogeneous, masculine sports hegemony that has formed our culture and society for years. He refers to the term hegemony to describe that this masculine picture formed through sports has helped set the standard in Western society. Kian says that this hegemony is reinforced by mass media in three ways: 1. The media serves to perpetuate male-dominated sports hegemony by simply refusing to cover, or very minimally covering female athletes and women’s sports 2. Limited coverage of female athletes results in the general public underestimating the number of women in competitive athletics; sports media often covers sporting events that help reinforce stereotypical feminine images and portrayals of women athletes 3. When sports media do cover female sporting events, they often minimize or trivialize women’s athletic accomplishments through their use of language and commentary.

Furthermore Kian adds that the lack of women in newsrooms and especially in powerful seats in sports departments is something that isn’t new, and he attributes the lack of women covering women’s sports to their fears of not being able to move up because of their lack of popularity. Kian draws three primary conclusions from his study: 1. Both men and women had social and societal factors during their lives that made the foundation of their hegemonic masculine view of sports 2. Once in the sports media profession, men and women have generally different experiences and these experiences lead to different attitudes 3. Once they enter into the media profession, both men and women generally exhibit the same attitude towards men’s sports and women’s sports.

Overall this study shows that the problem of lack of coverage of women’s sports isn’t completely rooted in newsroom diversity, and that it’s more of a cultural problem as well. Additionally, the study displayed that there is definitely a problem with equality amongst women in sports departments, and it’s not something that is going away with time.