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Editorial
Women’s Sport still warming the bench (15 August)
(Opinion) The proposed changes to media regulation could result in an increase in women’s sport coverage for free to air television. But will this increase in coverage result in an increase in interest?
Debate over this topic has raged for almost as long as women have been allowed to participate in the upper echelons of the sporting world and was again pushed into the media spotlight following a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into women’s sport.
In the submission, Liz Ellis and The Women in Sports Media Group have demanded that a minimum of 30 percent of sports media coverage be of women’s sport, which has brought back the debate of what makes women’s sport the poor cousin to men’s sport.
The Age sportswriter Greg Baum’s (albeit intentionally) chauvinistic response to this demand claims it is because people only want to watch elite athletes that there is a lack of interest in women’s sport. Baum states, “In athletic endeavours, men will generally outrate women where comparisons are possible. Women are as skilful, but only sometimes as strong and fast as men, and so their sporting pursuits mostly are less of a spectacle.”
Offensive as this claim may be, Baum is simply reflecting a held belief amongst the viewing public, the sponsors, advertisers and the media. Advertising and sponsorship dollars are distributed by men and still go to high-profile traditional sports, men’s AFL, rugby and cricket and until we can move away from this view, women’s sports will remain in the background.
Will dictating a minimum amount of coverage really support the fight for equality of women’s sport with men’s? Will the audience follow women’s sport purely on the basis that more coverage will allow for better recognition of women athletes and therefore generate greater interest in the game?
I’d like to think so. In an ideal world, we should have equal coverage of all sports. Perhaps the general population hasn’t been given the chance to view significant amounts of women’s sport and learnt to appreciate it the way we appreciate men’s sport. In which case I wholeheartedly support the introduction of a minimum requirement of coverage.
But I fear that equality will take more than a demand that 30% of coverage be of women’s sport. Women’s sport is still grossly underfunded. Until the sponsorship and advertising dollars roll in, women’s sport will sadly remain a secondary exhibition and the participants anonymous.
Increasing coverage, though, is a step in the right direction. Until we can prove definitively that there is no audience for women’s sport, and the current situation is hardly a perfect test situation, we cannot establish the real reason for the inequality. Who knows, perhaps if women’s cricket and netball received the same amount of coverage and hype as men’s cricket and AFL, interest would increase.
By Merrin Hughes
Links
Age – Women must earn coverage
News Ltd – Women’s sport to win with TV changes
ABC – Coonan outlines digital future
Canberra Times -- Stereotypes hurting sport
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