The invisible woman: gender and sport in an important newspaper in Brazil

Abstract

One of the sectors that have a fundamental part in sports myth construction is the media. It creates, reinforces and destroys myths about the athletes, their realizations and events. Some international studies have been showing how media's sport coverage has been privileging male athletes, in detriment of the female athletes. The aims of this researchwere: quantify the Folha de São Paulo's sports coverage section of dedicate to men and women through an analyses of the percentage of articles; verify the size of the article through an average of words; and how often they use comments related to the gender through a format analyses. The data was collected between August 9th and September 9th, 2002 and February 3rd and April 3rd, 2003. Between August and September, 93 articles (11.49%) about female sports and 689 articles (85.16%) about male sports were written, a difference of approximately 700%. In February the difference was even bigger; 88.4% of the coverage was about males and only 4.04% was about females; in March, males had 87.95% of the articles and women had 4.68%. There was also a big difference between articles size. Between August and September, the average number of words for males was 212.2 while for females was 138; in February the average was 246 words for males and only 32.4 for females. In March, male average was 215.3 and female was 18.7. The format analyses demonstrated that men are cited more times for their athletic abilities than women, who received more citations about their physical appearance. These results show that in Brazil, like some other countries, female athletes continue being less represented in the media, even though the number of women participating and being well succeeded in sports is rising. Without appearing in newspapers and sports programs, the female athlete has to face a lot of difficulties and obstacles to keep active in sports; like the lack of sponsors, bad practice conditions and low wages, which forces them to search for a second job , making their athletic progress more difficult.