Speaker
Description
The recent paper by Cooky and al. (2021) about the situation of women athletes’ media representation in the United States for more than 25 years illustrate the poor quantitative television coverage of women in sports. Toni Bruce (2016) also states that if the new rules of women sport media representations allow them to be beautiful and powerful, they are still depicted as model of the white and heterosexual models.
In this communication, I will expose the results of a study conducted in Canada about the quantitative representation of women in sport media and how they are depicted in them. We can’t just infer that USA results are the same in Canada; Canada is a bilingual country with two separate media system, the francophone and the anglophone. Also, gender is not a constant; the power relationship that it implies, and the way people perform gender vary in time, space, and geographical area (Scott, 1986).
The study was conducted between August 1st 2019 and November 30th 2019. Ten different media were analyzed: five anglophone, four francophone and one bilingual. Four of them were television station, four were daily papers and two were web media. Comparatively to USA results, women team sport almost doesn’t exist in Canadian’s media coverage. The only women who are depicted are the one who are overtly successful in an individual sport. Results also show a dual coverage: media point the barriers experienced by women athletes but, at the same time, they tend to reproduce the same barriers and bias in their coverage of them.
