The Amount of Women’s Sports Coverage on International Sports News Websites’ Home Pages

Abstract

A major topic of analysis in sport in Western media has been the gender gap between the amount of coverage dedicated to men’s sports compared to the amount of coverage women’s sports receive. Most of the existing research on the gender gap in sports coverage has been conducted in traditional media, but the creation and development of the internet gave new hopes to women’s sports representatives to bridge the gap. This study is a yearlong, quantitative content analysis of the home pages of eight sports news websites from four Western countries—the United States, Canada, France, and Great Britain. The goal is to determine whether the “symbolic annihilation” of women in sports found in traditional media coverage is perpetrated online, a platform on which journalists and editors are not limited by time or space.