Page 165 - Sport Culture and the Media

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Messner et al. 2000, 2003; Higgs et al. 2003), and those addressing print are
mainly concerned with text (e.g. Markula 2001). Nevertheless, there is a good
deal of accumulated empirical research on sports photography arguing that it is
heavily gender biased in that we see sportsmen much more than sportswomen,
and that they are often shown doing different things in a manner that confers
greater prestige on male than on female athletes. Kane and Greendorfer (1994),
in surveying research on gender and sports photography, discover a pattern of,
first, ‘underrepresentation and symbolic annihilation’, and second, of a type of
coverage they call ‘caricatured femininity’. In terms of the former, they find that
‘The overwhelming evidence from this literature is that women continue to be
severely underrepresented in the highly prestigious world of sport’ (Kane and
Greendorfer 1994: 36). In coming to this conclusion, they cite a study of the
covers of Sports Illustrated magazine between 1954 and 1978 in which sports-
women received only 5 per cent of coverage (Boutilier and SanGiovanni 1983).
Similarly, of photographs in Young Athlete magazine between 1975 and 1982,
less than 33 per cent included female athletes (Rintala and Birrell 1984). If these
studies are thought to represent the ‘bad old days’ before more enlightened
attitudes to gender took hold, the authors point out that ‘Several of the most
recent studies [such as Lumpkin and Williams 1991 and Duncan et al. 1991]
have replicated findings from earlier research’ (Kane and Greendorfer 1994: 35).
Lest, again, it is objected that these data are from the USA, similar findings have
emerged from studies in countries like Australia (Brown 1996) and Britain
(Jennifer Hargreaves 1994).
But the quantity of images is only one aspect of power in the sports media.
There is also the second issue raised by Kane and Greendorfer of their quality,
and in this regard they conclude that ‘the literature suggests that even when
sportswomen are depicted in the media, they are consistently trivialized and
marginalized through the type of coverage they receive’ (Kane and Greendorfer
1994: 36). In supporting this conclusion, they cite such studies as the analysis
of the 1979 Sports Illustrated Silver Anniversary issue, which found that 60 per
cent of all photographs of sportswomen showed them in ‘passive, non-
athletic roles’ compared with only 44 per cent of all photographs of sportsmen
(Boutilier and SanGiovanni 1983). If this finding appears to be somewhat sur-
prisingly close in the proportions of males and females shown to be ‘inactive’
in sports photographs, there are many other quantitative and qualitative studies
that produce a starker contrast in the ‘gendering’ of sports photography.
Stoddart (1994a: 5), for example, found that quantity was not the main
problem, in that ‘Photographs of sportswomen are plentiful in newspaper
sporting sections. It is noticeable, however, that the representations are not
necessarily about sport and frequently show women as passive rather than
active participants’. Duncan (1990), in an analysis of 186 photographs from the