When Title IX was signed into law in 1972 as an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it required equal numbers of participation in men's and women's college athletics.
However, the law said nothing about equal coverage for men and women's sports in the media.
While women's sports'both professional and collegiate'have struggled to gain acceptance in the public sphere in the past three decades, an even bigger obstacle has been in the area of publicity and recognition. For years before Title IX was introduced, there was little to no attention paid to women's sports, especially at the collegiate level.
Greg Sprout, sports editor of the Wisconsin State Journal, said the change in media coverage of women's college sports is increasing over time.
\It's been a gradual thing,"" Sprout said. ""It didn't change overnight.""
Even though coverage of women's sports is still not nearly as prominent as the coverage of men's sports, there have been several important advances in print coverage of women's athletics. Since the inception of Title IX, several prominent magazines dealing solely with issues of female athletics have been started. Women's Sports and Fitness, established in 1974 by Billie Jean King's Women's Sports Foundation, is one of the premier women's sports magazines in the country and has more than 200,000 female subscribers, according to a 1997 New York Times report. Another prominent magazine is Time Inc.'s Sports Illustrated for Women, which began publication in 1997.
| Fundamentals Title IX at UW The female perspective Media impact The football question |
Since the early 1970s, there has also been a push for daily newspapers to cover more women's collegiate sports. The Wisconsin State Journal covers a multitude of women's sports on the UW campus, ranging from volleyball to basketball, but Sprout said the increased coverage of women's sports in the State Journal is not a direct result of Title IX legislation. Rather, Sprout said his coverage of women's sports is based on two main criteria.
""Truly it's a reflection in the interest in those sports and the access level,"" Sprout said.
However, Sprout said he does get some complaints from readers. Most deal with the lack of coverage. Sprout said he also gets complaints from readers that have no interest in women's collegiate sports.
""There's a faction out there that I've heard from that doesn't want it covered at all,"" Sprout said.
Sprout said some readers argue that since the media cover women's college sports and dedicate content to those sports, the coverage of popular men's sports has declined. However, Sprout said covering women's college sports has made the Journal a stronger paper.
""Some people assume we do one thing at the cost of another thing,"" Sprout said. ""I can honestly say that our coverage of men's basketball hasn't diminished because we covered women's basketball.""
While print coverage of women's sports is still lacking, some of the biggest gaps between the coverage of men's and women's sports comes in other forms of media. Despite the big gains women's sports have achieved in past few years'such as the NCAA's long-term deal with ESPN to air the women's college basketball tournament'media coverage in outlets other than print is severely lacking.
Backing up this claim are two recent studies of television and online coverage. One study, conducted by University of Southern California sociology Professor Michael Messner and founded by the Amateur Athletic Foundation, examined coverage of women's sports on the major television networks and their affiliates, along with cable networks like ESPN during the spring and summer 2000.
Messner, who had conducted similar surveys of women's sports coverage in 1989 and 1993, found that affiliates gave 88.2 percent of their sports coverage to men's sports and that men's sports stories outnumbered those of stories about women's athletics six to one. On ESPN, the coverage was even worse, as Messner found the sports-only cable channel donated just 2.2 percent of its time on its sports-news program ""SportsCenter"" to women's sports. Also, ESPN's segments on men's sports outnumbered those of women's 15 to one.
More recently, a study led by doctoral student Mike Sagas at Texas A&M revealed that as far as coverage of women's college sports is concerned, the universities might be to blame.
The researchers looked at the publicity and importance given to the coverage of men's and women's sports (especially baseball and softball) at 52 universities across the United States, including schools from seven major conferences. Sagas said the idea for the study, which was conducted in 1999 but released this year, was easy enough, since there had been little critical analysis of the difference in media coverage on Web sites.
Sagas said he knew he would probably find a disparity between the coverage but was surprised at how big the difference actually was. For instance, in the 52 universities studied, 89 percent were likely to have updated information and statistics on the Web site after a baseball game, while that figure dropped to 79 percent for softball.
""I was a little surprised to see how grossly biased the sites were,"" Sagas said.
Sagas and his fellow researchers have since followed up on the original survey. Sagas has studied the difference in basketball and recently re-examined the baseball-softball issue.
""In basketball [the disparity] is not as bad. It's almost the same,"" Sagas said. ""Then we did baseball and softball again and it was worse.""
Still, Sagas said he thinks Internet coverage of women's sports will improve, citing increased school funding as the main factor.
However, Sagas' results show that there is less of an emphasis on women's sports nationally. According to Sprout, those findings are reasonable enough, since most sports fans are interested in one particular sport.
""Most of the people who follow sports have a narrow range but an incredible depth,"" Sprout said. ""They follow one sport, and they want lots of it.""
Unfortunately for college athletics in the last 30 years, those sports have traditionally been on the men's side of the ball.
