How Campus Media Cover Sports: The Gender-Equity Issue, One Generation Later

Abstract

Title IX has encouraged school administrators to work toward gender equity in athletics spending, and now many more women participate in college sports and earn college athletics scholarships than in the time before Title IX. This study was designed to assess whether Title IX has translated into equal coverage of men's and women's athletics by campus media. Based on these exploratory findings, the answer is no. College newspapers in the study covered male athletes and events in 72.7% of their sports stories, and college television operations devoted 81.5% of their sports stories to males. The overall amount of time or space devoted to comments from female or male participants or observers mirrored the discrepancy in the number of stories devoted to male versus female athletes. However, when college sports media did cover female athletes, the quality of the coverage was equivalent to that given to men. There was no significant difference in the average number of words per print story or the average number of seconds per broadcast story, nor was there a difference in the way the stories were presented based on the sex of the athletes. However, the huge disparity in the quantity of coverage indicates that campus media mirror professional media in regard to gender equity in their coverage of sports.