Gender Bias In Sport

Gender bias, more commonly known as sexism or being sexist, is a very well known issue in society today. However, sexism isn't taken as seriously in today's generation as it should be, especially in females. Males have always been compared to woman no matter the subject. Focusing primarily on the coverage of the sport tennis and basketball between both male and female coverage there are some interesting biases when comparing the two genders. Gender biases relate to the unequal or unfair treatment of another gender based on the gender of the person. Breaking down gender bias in sports journalism, especially in tennis, there are many biases towards woman rather than males in media, income, promotion, and most importantly privilege.

The media

Men are seen with the overlying privilege for any sport that they play and are portrayed as “one up” from a woman in sports based on listeners and viewers. This bias puts many female athletes feel discouraged because they feel as if they do not have the same privilege in the sport they dedicated themselves to than men. In terms of media portraying the female athlete entitlement to their sport, they do everything, but speak to the athletic ability of female athletes. Diane Ponterotto a psychologist at the University of Rome states, “The sports media often convey the idea that female attractiveness and sexual desirability are more important than athletic ability. Commentaries highlight the female athletes’ sexual attributes, explicitly mentioning body shape and parts (legs, breasts, mouth), often with evocations of bedroom activities”(Ponterotto). When explaining this quote, the media portrays female athletes as sexual entertainment instead of analyzing what's going on in the match or game. Knowing this it takes away part of a woman's privilege to play a sport where the woman in the media are treated unequally compared to how male athletes are

Although some may say that male sports are dominant and female sports are submissive, this can be seen as a true statement for a lot of people however, both the sports can be represented and treated as equal with a little education. According to Liye Fu et al., “we propose a language-model-based approach to quantify differences in questions posed to female vs. male athletes, and apply it to tennis post-match interviews”. This quotation stabs at the gender bias in sports journalism by using a language model or using educational questions to treat each interview with the equality of both male and female athletes. This is just one of the ways that education can help to squash this gender bias however, the media has to be willing to take this information into consideration and check their work or check what they are going to say in an interview before a match even happens. This way the possibility of a gender bias in sports journalism is close to impossible because of the double-checking of the media