Thursday 7 May 2009

Quick hit: Sportswomen spend little time in the spotlight

Two Massey University researchers Sarah Leberman and former Black Fern and Massey lecturer Farah Palmer have interviewed 25 Manawatu kids to find out how children are influenced by the media.

The researchers analysed Olympic coverage from 12 different media outlets in five countries.

In New Zealand, a third of the photographs taken were of women, even though they made up about 50 per cent of the Olympic team.

The results were gathered from 432 photographs of New Zealand Olympians published in The Press and The New Zealand Herald during August.

A discrepancy was also discovered in the coverage of different ethnicities, with the vast majority of photos taken worldwide being of white males.

The gender divide was clearest in South Africa, where men gained 72.8 per cent of the coverage, but in China the split was nearly equal.


Read the rest here

H/T: Azlemed

2 comments:

backin15 said...

Good research, good publicity. The portrayal of women in sport is woeful - but better in NZ that in Australia - so it's good to see this empirically recorded as the basis for further advocacy/funding etc.

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling said...

I'm not sure it is *that* good research. Would it not be better to look at some more Olympiads, like the one previous where, think, three females won medals in the same weekend? Sarah Ulmer, Barbara Kendall and someone else.

Or to get real serious a comparison of how much coverage a male and female medal get corrected for medal colour and event etc.

The research does look weak to my amateur eye.