ESPN is one of the major sports news companies in the world. As shown below, the top banner on ESPN.com includes shortcuts to only male leagues.
The “Soccer” tab is not male-specific, yet when the computer mouse hovers over it, male leagues and teams dominate the screen. The only female team included here is the US Women’s National Team. The inequality does not stop at how a website prioritizes teams or leagues.
Sportscenter and other news shows devote the majority of their time to the three men’s sports of football, basketball, and baseball. In 2009, these three sports took up 71.7% of all coverage. Sportscenter’s coverage of women’s sports in 2009 was a mere 1.4% of their airtime. This was a decline from the 2.2% of airtime Sportscenter gave women’s sports in 1999.1
Even when top men’s sports were not in season, they still had major stories about them instead of in season female teams. When women’s sports get airtime, newscasters often use sarcastic, disrespectful humor.
For example, before Christmas in 2009, KNBC had a 24 second story of a Japanese bra that unfolds into a putting green as a promotion for a gift for women “who love to play golf”. This story was the only “female sports” story embedded in almost two weeks of exclusively football, baseball, men’s soccer, and men’s hockey stories.2
The quality and quantity of airtime that professional women’s sports get affects their athletes’ salaries. With little or low-quality exposure, less people are informed about games, which leads to a smaller fan base, less ticket sales, less merchandise sales, and overall less income for the team.3 With the amount of stories and coverage the NBA receives compared to the WNBA, it is easy to see why the maximum salary in the WNBA in 2015 was $109,500, whereas the maximum salary in the NBA in the same year was $16.4 million.4
There are not just differences in annual salaries; there are also disparities in prize money. In 2014, when the German men’s soccer team won the World Cup, their prize money was 44 times as much as the prize money the Japanese women’s soccer team won for the World Cup in 2011.5
As it stands now, with unequal airtime and unequal salaries, women athletes’ low salaries have consequences. If the players cannot support themselves with their salary, they either get a part-time job on top of professionally playing, or they are driven to a different career all together.
Something that could start to solve these inequalities would be for the sports networks, like Sportscenter, to change their allocations of airtime. If they make an effort to view more serious, respectful stories about women’s sports, they could possibly bring in a larger fan base for female athletes. The best adjustment would be to split the airtime equally, so all teams and all genders get an equal amount of exposure, and the audience has an equal choice between who to watch.
As a female athlete, it is shocking that professional female athletes have to fight in order to achieve equal pay. What’s disappointing is how much harder it is to find and watch a women’s game than it is for a men’s game. The change towards equality in exposure and salaries needs to happen for the next generation of young athletes.
[1,2] Messner, Michael; Cooky, Cheryl. “Gender In Televised Sports: News and Highlight Shows, 1989-2009.” Center for Feminist Research 39 (2010): 437-453
[3] Moawad, Jad. “Gender Inequality in Sports.” FairPlay, Revista de Filosofia, Ética y Derecho del Deporte 13 (2019): 28-53.
[4] Campbell, Honey; “Superior Play, Unequal Pay: U.S. Women’s Soccer and the Pursuit for Pay Equity Comments.” University of San Francisco Law Review 51 (2017): 545-570
[5] Moawad.
