Gender byline bias in sports reporting: Examining the visibility and audience perception of male and female journalists in sports coverage

Abstract

Gender-based marginalization and discrimination in sports journalism is an ongoing concern of research addressing gender equality in journalism. The visibility of female reporters as authors in terms of sports coverage has been found to be under 10% in content analysis that spans several countries. Research into audiences’ perceptions of authorship in sports journalism further found female authors to be prone to byline biases—even though findings are mixed. In this article, we set out to examine if the under representation of female sport authors has changed over the time span of 15 years. This is explored by conducting a content analysis of news coverage from 2006 to 2020 (Study 1). Further, we study whether biases against female authors in sports coverage (still) exist among recipients and in how far this is different for male and female sports. To address audience perceptions of gender in sport reporting, we performed an online experiment investigating the effect of female and male authorship as well as men’s and women’s football (soccer) as one of the most popular topic of sport reporting (Study 2). We found that female authorship in sports journalism is still marginalized without any significant improvement observed from 2006 to 2020 (Study 1). This contrasts with our findings on audiences’ perceptions of male and female authors, which did not confirm a gender byline bias (Study 2). Our results therefore suggest that gender discrimination in newsrooms cannot be justified by audience perceptions.