New research from Women in Sport looks at the visibility of women’s sports coverage across five European countries.
With evidence of some countries failing to achieve more than 2% of coverage for women’s sport and around 30% of some channels having zero women’s sport coverage in some periods, the report shows there is still a long way to go in achieving parity for women’s and men’s sport.
Key findings from Where are all the Women?:
- Women’s sport media coverage lags significantly behind that for men’s: Across all five countries, despite the variation in the extent of coverage, women’s sport is significantly less visible than men’s sport and does not reflect the extent of high-level women’s sport taking place.
- Levels of visibility need to be elevated: in four of the five countries, women’s sport failed to achieve above 10% of all sports coverage. Coverage is at its lowest in Malta and Greece, where it failed to achieve more than 2%.
- Pay TV is dominated by men’s sport programming: 31% of the channels monitored showed only men’s sport (23 out of 74). Some free-to-air channels, as well as Eurosport, provided coverage of women’s sport to a greater extent through major mixed events.