Women Take Power: A Case Study of Ghanaian Journalists at the Russia 2018 World Cup

Abstract

Women have been entering the sports journalism industry in growing numbers around the world but are still oftentimes sidelined. Female sport media workers constantly face more challenges than their male counterparts because of unfriendly working environments and conditions based in sexism. Most of the existing research has been conducted in Anglo-Saxon environments; yet, women’s inclusion and exclusion in the sport industry is an international problem. This case study expands the literature through in-depth interviews with the only two Ghanaian journalists who covered the FIFA World Cup 2018. These two Ghanaians, the only representatives of their country in the media in Russia, were women, a unique situation that deserved to be examined to better understand the place of women in sport media.

Feminist Sport Media Studies in SSJ: Mapping Theoretical Frameworks and Geographies of Knowledge Production

“…Notable is the epistemic approach that centers participants' perspectives in relation to media representation. Few articles focus on gendered industry norms from the perspectives of practitioners (Coche, 2021;Schoch & Ohl, 2011). This absence indicates that substantial body of scholarship on journalists' attitudes and experiences is published in mass communication-rather than sociology of sport-journals (Antunovic & Whiteside, 2018).…”

“…The central arguments problematize the individualistic notions of "choice," "freedom," and "empowerment," whereby sport and media organizations celebrate achievements in "gender equality," while relying on sportswomen's athletic labor to address inequalities (Pavlidis et al, 2020;Rahikainen & Toffoletti, 2021). Further, gendered neoliberalism is also pertinent in the work of women who work in sports journalism, as evidenced in Coche's (2021) study with Ghanian journalists covering international sport in ways that challenge Western feminist logics. In these articles, transnational and postcolonial feminist theories inform the analysis, but the central theoretical frameworks are still based on Western literature on neoliberal feminism.…”

“…While not reflected in their SSJ publications, these authors often publish on media in multiple contexts. For example, in the SSJ article, Coche (2021) interviewed journalists from Ghana who covered the 2018 Men's FIFA World Cup. Previously, Coche has published on televised Olympic broadcasts in the United States (e.g., Coche & Tuggle, 2018), but also conducted a comparative analysis of media coverage of women's sports in Canada, France, Great Britain, and the United States (Coche, 2015).…”