Anything Can Happen in Women’s Tennis, or Can It? An Empirical Investigation Into Bias in Sports Journalism

Abstract

The claim that “anything is possible in women’s sports” frequently employed by both sports journalists and general audiences highlights the widespread perception of a seemingly uncontested truth about female athletes and their (in)ability to perform consistently at peak levels in comparison to male athletes. We focus on this treatment of female athletes in the world of women’s tennis and contest the “common sense” and “experience” justifications of the unpredictability in women’s sports with actual data to reveal clear media bias. Utilising a database of the Association of Tennis Professionals and Women’s Tennis Association tournaments dating back to the late 1960s and covering approximately 225,000 fully described matches, we examine the “anything can happen in women’s tennis” assumption through logistic regression, focusing on the effect of rank differential on the winning probability in the match while controlling for other factors (tournament type and stage, court surface, age differential, and elite players). The results are rather shocking. The women’s matches do not show higher instability or lower predictability at all, but rather the contrary—the men’s matches show lower dependence on the rank difference. The results are robust as checked for data sets of the year 2000 onwards and those including only special events such as Grand Slams.

Does The Betting Industry Price Gender? Evidence from Professional Tennis

“…Magnus and Klaassen (1999) report that, contrary to popular belief, an unseeded woman is no less likely than a man to beat a seeded opponent, while del Corral (2009) shows that such an upset is greater when it concerns an unseeded female, rather than a male, player who has formerly ranked among the top ten. Tejkalova and Kristoufek, (2019) or Du Bois and Heyndels (2007) find no evidence of lower predictability in women's match results.…”

“All the Makings of an Eventual NFL Starter:” Racial/Ethnic Disparities in a Decade of National Football League Draft Profiles as Revealed by Natural Language Processing

“…Much has been examined regarding the antecedents and consequences of bias in sport (Billings, 2003; Boiché et al, 2014; Cunningham, 2010; Moskowitz & Carter, 2018; Rada, 1996; Salaga & Juravich, 2020; Stone et al, 1999; Tejkalova & Kristoufek, 2021), and an understated theme in this literature suggests that language plays a critical role in revealing such disparities (e.g., Gardner et al, 2023). Indeed, a cursory review of National Football League (NFL) draft profiles observed that writers focused on the cognitive ability of White quarterbacks more than Black quarterbacks, and the athletic ability of Black quarterbacks more than White quarterbacks (Boylan et al, 2017).…”