Despite the growth of female participation in sports, media coverage of female athletics remains stagnant. Scholarship regarding the treatment of female athletes in magazines, newspapers, and news and highlight programming has shown that sports journalism organizations demonstrate ambivalence with minimal coverage that reinforces gender stereotypes. This study examined 1,587 Instagram images from the primary accounts of the four major American sports networks. The resulting data indicate that women’s athletic coverage lags significantly behind men’s athletics. Females are more likely to appear alongside a male and are more likely be shown in culturally “appropriate” sports and in nonathletic roles.

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The Olympic Games offer scholars the opportunity to better understand how broadcasters visually frame male and female athletes to their large audiences. Traditionally, scholars have focused their efforts on the televised Olympic broadcasts and photojournalism coverage in newspaper and magazines. Scholarship has historically found that female athletes were underrepresented in event coverage and framed along gender stereotypes; however, in more recent Olympic Games, research has shown the news media has provided more equitable coverage between the genders. Yet digital and social media platforms (SMPs) play a significantly larger role in how Olympic broadcasters share content and engage with audiences. Utilizing media framing theory, this study examines how gender is framed on the Olympic Instagram accounts of the two official North American rights holders: the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Researchers collected a cross-sectional sample from the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Results indicate that NBC and CBC were generally equitable in SMP coverage of men’s and women’s athletic achievements.

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