Shining Against The Odds
The Sunday Age
31 August 2008
Peter Munro
They were the toast of a nation during the Beijing Olympics but will Australia's female sporting stars remain pin-up names in the media? The signs are not good. Peter Munro reports.
STEPPING on to the airport tarmac into a swarm of supporters, media and politicians, Stephanie Rice might have marvelled at her sudden splash of fame. As Australia's most successful athlete in the Beijing Olympics, the glamour girl turned golden girl led her teammates during the closing ceremony, and then off the plane when they arrived home last week. The swimmer's three gold medals also led the charge of Australia's Olympic women, who won 8 of our 14 gold medals, despite making up less than half the team.Years on from the 2008 Games, many will recall their tears and triumph. Among them was the stirring story of triathlete Emma Snowsill, whose first boyfriend died in a hit-and-run accident in 1992, and who overcame a back injury and asthma to win gold. Then there was the genuine jubilation of silver-medallist hurdler Sally McLellan, whose single mother had to work two jobs to fund her daughter's sporting dreams; and silver-medallist cyclist Anna Meares, the coalminer's daughter who returned to the track after breaking her neck this year.Every four years, women athletes get the chance to shine against the odds. But, barely a week after the Olympic flame was doused and a fire-engine red, double-decker bus is loaded up for London in 2012, media coverage of women's sports has dwindled. A 1996 snapshot of Australian media coverage of women's sports, titled An Illusory Image, found they comprised only 2% of TV sports broadcasts, 1.4% of sport time on radio, 6.8% of sports magazine coverage and 10.7% of the back pages in newspapers. In one example, a commercial TV sports show had dedicated six minutes to guinea pig racing and only 15 seconds to women's sports in a single show.Looking over the week's media coverage, little seems to have changed. In the hundreds of pages dedicated to sport in The Age and Herald Sun, women were given short shrift, featuring only as part of coverage of the US Open tennis and in small stories on the surfing world titles and netball's new national competition.On television and radio, talk has invariably turned to football finals and miscreant men.So, where do women feature in this? Some reports suggest they are not entirely out of the picture. The ABC is believed to have won the right to televise the new national women's soccer league, starting in October and Channel Ten has reportedly outbid Fox Sports for the second season of the successful trans-Tasman netball championships. But, these are blips on the big screen. Two years after a Senate inquiry found "an entrenched sexism underpinning the lack of balance in the coverage of sport", Australia's remarkably successful women athletes remain rarely seen or heard. Fox Sports Channels director Tony Sinclair says there is a widespread perception people prefer to see men's sports because they are faster, stronger and more dynamic. "I'm sitting in front of five TV sets, all with sport on them and one has women playing in the US Tennis Open."You look at the level of interest in sports around the world when comparing a men's version to women's - and even women agree generally - as a television or as a spectator sport, quite often the male version is preferable," he says.Foxtel has significantly more women's sports than free-to-air commercial channels, including women's golf, gymnastics, equestrian and tennis. Yet, women's sports still have trouble matching men for market appeal. "More people want to see the English Premier League than any women's soccer competition around the world, because the best players in the world play in the Premier League - and that's to do with money and opportunity and the relative merits of the game," Sinclair says."The men's version of the game of soccer is a faster, more dynamic version than the women's. We believe people want to see the best, no matter what it is."THE Olympic Games, and to a lesser extent Commonwealth Games, are exceptional in the prominence they give women. In 2006, a Federal Senate inquiry into women's sports noted Australia's swimming team at the 2004 Athens Games won more medals than their male teammates.The report also highlighted the success of Australia's women's hockey and netball teams, and the individual achievements of golfer Carrie Webb, basketballer Lauren Jackson and cricketer Belinda Clark.And yet, the inquiry found sporting performance was not necessarily related to media coverage. They gave several other reasons why women's sports were rarely seen or heard, such as: the advantage of incumbency held by men's sports, the already overcrowded Australian sports market, the attitude of the media, and the dominance of men working in the media.Women's sports were "trapped in cycles of neglect", the inquiry found. Limited media coverage meant limited funding, sponsorship and poor venues, as well as a lack of professionalism, organisation and role models in sport. This in turn, reinforced the dearth of media exposure.It found that, to break this cycle; the Federal Government needed to help fund partnerships between sporting bodies and broadcasters, as well as fund the training of women's sports administrators to sell themselves better to the media.In this year's Budget, the new Government promised $16 million over two years to help televise the women's soccer league. It also invested in the trans-Tasman netball competition but is yet to respond in any comprehensive way to the concerns raised in the Senate inquiry.Author of An Illusory Image, Murray Phillips, says there are persistent problems with both the quantity and quality of media coverage. "Women's sports tend to be positioned either in the bowels of the paper or marginalised in other ways," he says."A lot of the stories written and broadcast about women are not necessarily about their sporting performance . . ."Some of the commentary on Stephanie Rice has not been about her performance but how she looks. Those sorts of commentary don't do justice to her athleticism . . . It suggests to women they're valued for their looks as much as their athleticism," he said.Dr Phillips, from the University of Queensland, says men's sports have historical connections within communities, families and the media that are hard to shake. But, he suggests the media should take a lead in making such change."The media has a lot of responsibility for providing or denying opportunities. Take women's basketball, we only know about them in the Olympic Games, and yet Lauren Jackson is the best player in the world," he says."There is no reason why that can't change. The argument from the media that we give them what they want is really shallow. It doesn't give the public what it wants, it gives us something they think we would like."You've only got to look at the Olympic Games to see it's not about male or female sports; it's about competition and entertainment and personalities."The ABC's coverage of women's sport is nearing parity with men's sports. The national broadcaster's head of sport and events, Iain Knight, says the station has a strategic interest in promoting women's sport."I think our challenge is to persuade men and women to watch women's sports," he says. "I think one of the things the Senate inquiry said is there is little opportunity for people to experience watching women's sport in television, and once they are given that experience more and more people are turned on to the idea. I think that's true and I think that's the role the ABC can play."But, few commercial media organisations see their role in a similar light - or can afford to. The Sunday Age's sports editor, Janelle Ward, says newspapers are not in the business of promotion. "If you want to take an advert out, fine, do that. We're here for reporting, analysis and telling the story behind the story," she says. Any deficit in the coverage of women's sports reflects readers' interest in elite national sports rather than any latent sexism, she says."Whether you have females or males in the chairs as newspaper editors or production people, it basically comes back to a judge of newsworthiness," she says."If Collingwood are playing Sydney in Sydney and it's a night match and a lot of people don't get that in their Sunday paper because they get the country edition, we'll get dozens and dozens of complaints. If we don't have the result of the premier league women's grand final, we're not going to get one complaint . . . Gender's got to come out of the question; it's the best sporting event on the day surely that gets the recognition."Ward says some sports, both men's and women's, miss out on coverage because they cannot compete on the national level. "As some competitions develop elite levels, such as the women's soccer league, I think there is a natural correlation that we do report more heavily," she says."I don't equate it back to the level of skill. I just see it as tiers of competition. If you've got a regional competition and you're putting it up against a national competition, then surely we have to go with something that has broader reader interest?"The Victorian Women's Football League sell themselves really well and are very persistent, but . . . after AFL, there's VFL; then you've got the amateurs' metropolitan competition and we are unable to cover that at all."Then you've got the country leagues and each one of those is bigger than the women's."AFL host Gerard Healey - who works on Fox Sports and radio station 3AW (owned by Fairfax Media, owner of The Sunday Age) - says his audience has few emotional ties to women's sports."Our listening audience has a large emotional buy-in to AFL issues but, on a week-to-week basis, they have no real emotional buy-in on a broad scale to the results or issues surrounding women's sports," he says.Mr Healey says cracking the Melbourne sporting market, in particular, presents problems for any sport without a long-standing emotional connection with the punters."We try sometimes to pick up a topic on women's sports but in the end the lines will fill up with the more obvious issues of the day. We have open lines, we don't control the callers. The callers dictate where we'll go, to a point, and that is typically AFL."It is almost impossible to go against the tide," he says.
