With Women's Sport Week and the Women's World Cup encouraging the prominence of women's sport, Hayley Morris, Alliance Office Assistant, has blogged about the growing appetite for women's sport coverage.
With almost poetic timing, the Women's World Cup 2015 began during Women's Sport Week. The opening day saw hosts Canada beat China 1-0, in front of 53,058 people. This audience was bigger than for any Canadian game in history… for both men and women. This record has brought the biggest need in women’s sport back to the forefront; the need for media coverage.
In 2014 the England Women's football team had 45,619 attendees to watch them play Germany, whereas only 40,181 turned out to watch the England Men's football team versus Norway. It should also be noted that there were approximately a further 10,000 tickets bought but not used for the women's team match because of travel issues on the day. Despite this difference, the men's match was aired on ITV's flagship channel ITV1, while the women's match was aired on the BBC's spin off channel BBC2.
According to the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation’s research, Say Yes to Success, only 7% of sports coverage focuses on women’s sport. The long argued excuse often put forward to explain this is that women are just not interested in sport. But the power of technology can easily debunk this. According to the stats, 46% of the viewers for the 2015 Superbowl were female, and 45% of the viewers for the Rugby World Cup in 2011 were female. Women are just as interested in watching sport as men.
Even more interestingly, when it came to the Women’s World Cup in 2011, 62% of viewers in the UK were male. In fact, FIFA’s Television Audience Report on the Women’s World Cup showed that males were the majority watchers in every country broadcast. Repucom’s SportsDNA data showed that interest in women’s football has risen from 16 per cent in 2011 to 21 per cent in 2014; in fact over 60% of sports fans would like to see more women’s sport on the TV. So not only are women interested in sport, but society in general is interested in women’s sport.
The real problem is that the media is moving more slowly than audience demands. People want to know about women’s sports, but the information is not being given to them. During the 2012 Olympics (the year that the first Team GB gold medals were won by female rowers Heather Stanning and Helen Glover, and the year that Nicola Adams won the first ever gold medal for women’s boxing) 97% of the sports media coverage was on men sports.
As demoralizing as this all sounds, progress is being made, albeit slowly. For the first time in history, the BBC will be broadcasting every single Women's World Cup match on their various channels. In fact England had it’s biggest peak audience with 2.4 million viewers for their game against France– yet another record broken. Sky Sports will be broadcasting all seven games in the Women's Ashes as well as the Netball Superleague and National Badminton League. The ridiculously popular football video game FIFA will include 12 women’s national teams in its newest version, FIFA 16, due to fan requests.
Ultimately it seems women’s sport will have to take on the role of the tortoise in this tale, versus men’s sports hare. And we all know how that turned out.
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