Sports programming, what place do women occupy?

Abstract

This article describes sportswomen's perception of sports in the media and aims to identify whether mass media empower them. The research work conducted 19 in-depth interviews with three focus groups composed of 33 Basque elite sportswomen. The results indicate that sports media programs contribute to represent men's sports (56.38%). 19.04% of the respondents mention that soccer is omnipresent; 14.28% of the respondents affirm that soccer invades the broadcasting space at the expense of women's sports when the programs give priority to aspects not concerned with those women athletes such as weddings, injuries, and others.