Women (Not) Watching Women: Leisure Time, Television, and Implications for Televised Coverage of Women's Sports

Abstract

This research explores the factors in choices women make about watching sports.The assumption about coverage of women's sports in post-Title IX decades has been that girls who have played will turn into women who watch, encouraging media producers to provide more women's sports programming. Yet that audience has not materialized, and women's sports have languished on the periphery of the sports media landscape. Using focus-group discussions with heterosexual, married women, we argue that sports media consumption is tied to gender roles and related domestic work. That association with emotion labor presents significant barriers to the cultivation of these women as fans of women's sports.

Leisure from International Voices: Foreign Labors’ Leisure Opportunities in Taiwan

“…Masculinities, expressed through masculine discourses, are identified as socially constructed, privileged ways of thinking that dominate society and are often associated with men but may also be associated with women (Whiteside & Hardin, 2011). In contrast, femininities, expressed through feminine discourses, are socially-constructed ways of thinking, featuring behaviours that are socially understood to be subordinate and are often, but not exclusively, expressed by women (Tsai, 2010b).…”

How the NWHL uses Twitter to #GrowTheGame

“…Indeed, one of the greatest hardships for Page373 women's sports to overcome is the small amount of media coverage they get. Scholars have studied the issue for more than three decades in traditional media and found that women's sports are greatly underrepresented compared to men's sports, and that female athletes are often framed as women rather than athletes, while the opposite is true for male athletes -in both print (Boutilier & SanGiovanni, 1983;Lumpkin & Williams, 1991;Christopherson, Janning, & McConnell, 2002;Hilliard, 1984;Eastman & Billings, 2000;Allen & Frisby, 2017) and on television (Adams & Tuggle, 2004;Cooky et al, 2015;Musto et al, 2017;Turner, 2014;Whiteside & Hardin, 2011). The one exception comes every four years during the summer Olympics when female athletes receive as much or sometimes even more media coverage than male athletes do (Billings & Young, 2015;Coche& Tuggle, 2016).…”

Status Report on HBCU Athletics: Participation, Finances, and Student Experiences

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