As the Women’s World Cup comes to a close this weekend, we are nearing the end of a cycle of commentary that crops up whenever women’s sports are the center of attention. There are myriad think pieces on the state of women’s sports and whether we should be lamenting or praising them. In part, all of them are right. In many ways, things are good. There is a still a ways to go, however, when it comes to resources, screen time, and support. One thing that would help is if we stopped hiding behind a series of predictable excuses for why female athletes continue to struggle in an era of non-stop sports.
More people in the US are watching women’s sports on TV than ever before but when it comes to getting people into seats at games, it’s an ever-present problem. More girls and women are participating all the time, especially in the United States, where Title IX’s impact is undeniable. Yet there is the ongoing fight to get SportsCenter to show women’s sports more than 2% of the time and the inevitable sexist response to women’s sports that come even from journalists. Sexist coverage of women’s soccer is both dying off and the same as always. Fifa (known for its sexism) recently published a piece about USA forward, Alex Morgan, that started by stating she is “a talented goalscorer with a style that is very easy on the eye and good looks to match.” While ESPN airs hundreds of women’s matches across all kinds of sports on TV or digitally, it can still be work to hard follow a specific league or team. That’s not to say it does not exist but rather that it is often relegated to niche parts of sites or social media, or left out of local coverage entirely.
Yes, things are better than ever for women’s sports but increased coverage – outside of the old favorites like Wimbledon or Olympic gymnastics – is only decades old and that’s a low bar to beat. How to make things better is where we really get stuck, though. Here are the most common excuses why women’s sports are ignored – and why those excuses don’t quite stick.
1) The women’s game needs to be more exciting
Some people claim that women’s sports are too boring and then wash their hands of it all. But Will Leitch convincingly argued that if you find sports boring, it’s because you are most likely ignorant of the larger context of the match you are watching. If Leitch is right, there is an obvious need for the media to make that context easily accessible and digestible for fans. Sometimes, though, the boredom threshold might be insurmountable. If someone finds that all the sports that they think are boring just happen to involve women, especially team sports, the problem has nothing to do with how the women play or the backstory to the match.
2) Women’s sport needs to improve the level of play
This is probably why the “it’s boring” defense often goes hand-in-hand with the one that if women want people to pay attention, they just need to be as good as men. But the same people who believe this probably watch the Little League World Series or college football, or some version of any sport that is not the very highest level. If you are a fan of sport, you consume all levels of it because sport is fun to watch in and of itself. For many observers though, women are not allowed to exist as athletes in and of themselves, but instead in direct comparison to men. This is unfair in a world that vastly under-resources girls and women when it comes to sport, and still in many places actively discourages their participation.
In a country such as the United States, if you want to start the conversation about women’s sport by comparing it to men’s, then don’t stop at level of play. Let’s also talk about scholarships and salaries women get for playing versus the ones men receive. The most equal of sports when it comes to pay is tennis and mainly because Venus Williams worked hard to make sure women earned equal money at the grand slam events. This disparity in men’s and women’s sports bleeds out into all kinds of areas. The number of female coaches is in decline, women are rarely in the sports casting booth unless it is women’s sports (and when they do announce for men’s games, the responses are terrible), and women created 10% of sports media content this last year, down from 17% the year before (and are not powerful players in the industry).
3) The media just show what people want to see
The media is often excused from their role in the marginalization of women’s sports because of claims they simply doesn’t generate enough interest to justify coverage. In a recent poll, though, “when asked why women’s sports often receive less attention, the most common reason given is simply that the media doesn’t give them enough airtime (42%).” Kavitha Davidson recently argued that the media need to give more space to women’s sports in order to grow that business: “It’s up to program directors to decide not just which sports fans want them to coverage [sic], but also which sports are worthy of coverage.” Cheryl Cooky, an associate professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Purdue, recently told the New York Times that “all of this is a vicious cycle. Advertiser revenue is tied to viewer ratings, and viewer ratings are shaped by media coverage.” So the argument that media won’t cover women’s sports until there is an audience misses the very way audiences are created and how the media can help do that. A sports media that is predominantly owned, controlled, and created by men.
4) If women supported women’s sports more, all would be well
This all leads to the most popular idea given when people are challenged to improve the situation: if more women watched women’s sports, a critical mass of fans would be reached, and the media would have to pay attention. This is an old refrain. In 2003, the New York Times ran a piece titled, “Why Don’t Women Watch Women’s Sports?” Two years ago, Frank Deford spoke directly to women when he said, “Ladies, want women’s sports to get more attention? Pony up.” Swin Cash recently said, “I think women have to start supporting women.”
This is a weirdly limiting way at trying to fix an already limited issue. The move to cut off a huge chunk of a potential audience and force women to continue to shoulder the burden of why women’s sports aren’t popular enough is a strange one (and assumes, incorrectly, that men aren’t interested in women’s sports). When it comes to resources, coaching positions and media coverage, women are a convenient scapegoat for those with the actual power – a wide range of people from executives to on-air personalities and reporters – to influence how women’s sports are perceived and how easy they are to access.
The current state of women’s sports is worth cheering but only if we remember how much more recognition it gets than a few decades ago. The things we tell ourselves about why women’s sports still lack support and resources – they are boring, they are mediocre, the media will show up when audiences show up, women don’t care enough – are all excuses and not solutions. A whole lot of people need to and can do more.
No single fix will get us to a golden age for women’s sports. We can either decide that they matter and actively change things to help these women succeed, or we can continue to hide behind strawman excuses that merely shift around blame and hide the fact that maybe, perhaps, we don’t care enough.
