Keeping Score

Recent studies

An updated study from researchers Linda Jean Carpenter and R. Vivian Acosta,  professors at Brooklyn College, who have been compiling data on Title IX for almost 30 years. Here is a Buffalo News piece that recaps the study. One of the highlights of the report is how the ranks of women competing in college sports keeps going up, but the number of women who coach them is going down - something I just wrote about for my university's alumni mag.

Also, another study from the Sport Journal titled "The Effect         of Gender Opportunity in Sports on the Priorities and Aspirations of Young         Athletes." Here's a snippet from the conclusion:

"One of the most telling results of this survey as it reflects the situation         of women in sports is the fact that female athlete at all levels gave         extremely low scores among the likelihood they would pursue a career in         sports, which could be a result of the declining number of women in coaching         and administrative positions in female athletics." (Flanagan, Sport Journal, Spring 2006)

I'm updating a study in the dog days of summer...

One of my projects for this summer and upcoming school year is updating a study that examined the sports sections of four newsapapers. The original study "Coverage of Women's Sports in Four Daily Newspapers" was done in 1990 and sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles. I thought it would be interesting to look again at the same four newspapers 15 years later. The newspapers are USAToday, Dallas Morning News, Orange County Register, and my hometown paper - the Boston Globe. These were the choices of the original study based on the Associated Press top sports section list they put out each year. I'm replicating the original study, but also expanding it a bit - to isolate golf and tennis stories - since both men and women are playing professionally during the timeframe of the study (July 1  - Sept. 30). Also, there was no WNBA in 1990, so I'm going to include some numbers on this also.

The papers are piling up in my house (too quickly!) and I'm starting to wade through them. So far, I've tackled USAToday and the Globe. My intital impression is that you can see the effort USAToday makes to cover women's sports. The Globe is another story - but it's also a regional paper, we're in the thick of Red Sox mania here (which gets most of the ink), but women's sports coverage seems lacking. But I'll reserve conclusions until all the evidence is in. A few months back, the Globe finally did get rid of a section that they devoted soley to women sports - buried in the sports section on Wed. I wrote them an angry letter about it when they first launched it eight or so years ago. To me, you should just cover women's sports - don't give these athletes a special page one day a week and shove it all in there. They made a similar insulting move when they would publish Sox coverage in Spanish only for games when Pedro Martinez pitched. There were good intentions behind these moves, but that still doesn't mean they're right.