UWM Expert Believes Olympic Coverage Remains Gender-Oriented and Gender-Biased

MILWAUKEE --The Olympics have provided an international audience with drama, spectacle and excitement.

They also are showing it a stereotypical presentation of women's athletics, according to Margaret Duncan, professor of human kinetics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Duncan, who studies gender stereotypes in televised sports, said there have been some "big picture" improvements in the coverage of this year's competition.

"The coverage so far seems to have very little blatant sexism or stereotyping," she said. "However, we could also look at the quantity of coverage, and say that the men's events are the ones that receive the most coverage."

Duncan's observations have been borne out by NBC's primetime coverage of the competition. Early in the broadcast, men's downhill skiing was billed as "the marquee event of the games."

She also has noticed differences in the way individual male and female athletes are presented to the public.

"I've been seeing and hearing an emphasis on women athletes' emotions and fashions," she added. "That's something that the media has traditionally concentrated on in its coverage of women's sports."

NBC's coverage of the Canadian/Russian figure skating controversy, for instance, focused primarily on Canadian Jamie Sale's "brave and gracious" response to not winning the gold, and considerably less time on her partner's emotional reaction to the judging.

Similarly, newspaper coverage of skier Picabo Street's final Olympic run stressed how much her parents worried about potential injuries and were relieved to see her retire from competition. Meanwhile, coverage of male athletes who recovered from previous injuries focused more on their personal accomplishments than any potential harm they might face.

Duncan and her co-investigator Michael Messner (University of Southern California) came up with a list of recommendations (for the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles) to insure balanced media coverage of women's sports. They include:

* Balancing coverage of sports involving both men and women.

* Covering women's sports in a non-sexualized and non-humorous manner.

* Developing the same on-air time and technical skills for coverage of women athletes as male athletes.

* Committing to putting more women and persons of color in anchor and play-by-play roles in broadcast booths.

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