Gender bias is an increasingly important issue in sports journalism. In this work, 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. We find that journalists ask male players questions that are generally more focused on the game when compared with the questions they ask their female counterparts. We also provide a fine-grained analysis of the extent to which the salience of this bias depends on various factors, such as question type, game outcome or player rank.
Much of the work on gender bias in sports reporting has focused on air-time'' @cite_16 @cite_14 . Other studies looked at stereotypical descriptions and framing @cite_7 @cite_5 @cite_3 @cite_1 . For surveys, see Knight:SexRoles or Kaskan:SexRoles:2014 , inter alia. Several studies have focused on the particular case of gender-correlated differences in tennis coverage @cite_12 @cite_11 @cite_10 . We extend this line of work by proposing an automatic way to quantify gender bias in sport journalism.
@cite_14 @cite_7 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_12 @cite_11
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Comparison of the sportscasting on ESPN and CNN and sports reporting in The New York Times and USA Today revealed the very high degree of embedded favoritism toward men’s sports and men athletes, even at times when major women’s sporting events were peaking in newsworthiness. The quantity of gender bias was significantly greater on ESPN’s SportsCenter than on CNN’s Sports Tonight, perhaps because of the somewhat different audiences they target. In addition, the amount of gender bias—measured three different ways—in the respected The New York Times also far exceeded that of USA Today, a disheartening finding about America’s so-called newspaper of record. Week-by-week crossmedia comparisons demonstrated the much greater marginalization of women’s sports in the electronic media, suggesting that newspapers provide a somewhat more positive model for sports journalism. The purpose of this study was to determine any significant differences in how reporters for newspapers and online sites framed men's and women's tennis. Articles on the 2007 U.S. Open in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, and online sites produced by ESPN, Fox Sports, and Sports Illustrated were examined. Results showed newspapers were more likely to minimize the athleticism of female athletes, thus strengthening hegemonic masculinity more than the newer medium of online journalism, which produced mixed results. This study examined 152 articles devoted to female tennis players competing in the 2000 Wimbledon Championships in The Times, Daily Mail, and The Sun, covering a 17-day period that coincided with the Wimbledon Championships fortnight. Based upon the theoretical framework of gender power relations, a qualitative textual analysis methodology was used to reveal recurring themes within the dominant discourse about female tennis players. Results indicate the narratives used by the predominantly male journalists devalued, marginalised, and trivialised the athleticism of the female tennis players. The British newspapers seemed equally infatuated with Anna Kournikova, who was portrayed as a kind of sporting Lolita, and her hyper-feminine peers, the 'heterosexual honeys'. In contrast, Serena and Venus Williams – the 'Amazons' – were subjected to racial bigotry. The racial distinctions suggested that the hegemonic standard of the media was a favourable bias towards White female athletes. The sociological implications of such coverage of professional female tennis players are also discussed. An interpretive analysis of mass circulation magazine articles on leading male and female professional tennis players indicates that both groups are treated in terms of a “debunking motif” which reveals their imperfections and character flaws. The flaws identified among the women are closely associated with stereotypically feminine gender roles, while the flaws observed among the men are associated with stereotypically masculine gender roles. Thus, the articles reinforce the concept of professional sport as a male preserve, while suggesting an underlying traditionally feminine gender role for the female athletes. It is argued that this construction of the female athlete role derives from the commercial sponsorship of professional tennis.