Still marginalized: Gender inequalities in the largest Polish daily’s sports coverage

Abstract

The studies conducted over recent decades on media sports coverage indicatedmajor underrepresentation of women’s sports. The underrepresentation of women’s sports in the media is aligned with the perception of sport as a masculine construct with sportswomen as the ‘other’. However, most studies were conducted in English-speaking countries. In this article we present our findings of press media coverage in Poland. The aim of the study was to provide an analysis of sports press coverage in the largest Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, with respect to gender inequality. The chosen method was content analysis. The results show an underrepresentation of women’s sports in the examined press coverage – only 12.5% of all articles concerned female sports. Qualitative analysis demonstrates that the articles differed in terms of the athletes’ gender as well. The study highlighted the gender-dependent nature of the examined sports press coverage in Poland.

Prejudice in the People’s Game: A Content Analysis of Race/Ethnicity in Polish Televised Football

“…This aligns with Dziubiński et al's (2019) findings in their research on gender inequality in Polish sports paper press. Similar to print press, in televised football White Polish athletes with disappointing results were "treated like men" (Dziubiński et al, 2019) through harsh negative evaluations. This suggests that Polish sport media reconstruct racial/ethnic categorizations and meanings, in part, by evaluating athletes according to the traditional and orthodox understandings of masculinity in Polish wider society in which heroic qualities such as chivalry and bravery are considered important (Kossakowski et al, 2019).…”

Gender byline bias in sports reporting: Examining the visibility and audience perception of male and female journalists in sports coverage

“…After that competition, the media wrote: "It was one small step towards Olympic gender equality and one giant leap from American Tara Geraghty-Moats to win the first-ever women's Nordic Combined World Cup gold" (Eurosport, 2020). Despite these developments, gender in sports is still a contested terrain-regarding both the representation of women's sports (Boykoff and Yasuoka, 2015;Hull, 2017;Zbigniew et al, 2019) and women reporters involved in professional sports reporting (Schmidt, 2013(Schmidt, , 2018Mitchelstein et al, 2020). Besides the fact that female sports are less likely to be the subject of media sports coverage, two aspects are especially interesting when examining gender equality in sports reporting: (1) the visibility of female journalists, which suggests that women are underrepresented as authors in sports coverage and (2) audiences' perceptions of female journalists, which imply a potential byline bias against sports coverage authored by women.…”