Women form just ‘in one per cent of sports stories’

MELBOURNE - A daily snapshot of Australian media has shown women were the subjects of just one per cent of sports stories published.

In an analysis of 374 stories from 26 Australian newspapers, radio and television stations and internet news sites, women wrote or presented 32 per cent of them.

“In sports news, not one of the stories sampled was written by a female reporter,” news.com.au quoted Queensland University of Technology journalism lecturer Dr Angela Romano, as saying.

Dr. Romana coordinated the Australian study for the Global Media Monitoring project, which analyzed a snapshot of the world’s media on November 10, 2009.

“Women also made up just 1 per cent of the 142 sources talked about or quoted in the sports stories that were studied,” she said.

She added: “It is time news organisations lifted their game and changed their sports reporting practices to be more inclusive of the sports and sports personalities they covered.

“The media, sporting bodies, relevant government departments and the community must all put a greater focus on gender equity in sport to address this glaring omission,” she said.

Among other findings Dr Romano said the Australian survey showed that women were commonly defined in terms of their status as a mother, daughter, wife, sister or other family relationship.

“Family status was mentioned for 33 per cent of women quoted or discussed in the news stories compared to only 13 per cent of male sources,” she said.

Dr Romano’s study involved an analysis of 17,795 news stories from news outlets. (ANI)