Argentina. The Observatory of Discrimination in Radio and TV, which depends on the National Communications Agency (ENACOM), prepared a report entitled "Women and sport", in which it analyzed the presence and development of gender roles in sports content channels.
The purpose of this type of initiative is to develop projects, instruments and means that make it possible to establish diagnoses, define priorities and formulate policies for gender equality and empowerment of women and diversity.
Television continues to be one of the main sources of information for a large part of the population, in the country and in the world. Therefore, it is interesting to visualize who and what stereotypes of women appear in the news, as well as to know the way in which people are presented and newsworthy events. Equally important is who is left out or what is not covered. Culturally based gender inequality and discrimination against women is reinforced in the media.
The content analysis carried out by the Observatory is a quantitative and systematic method of social research used to study the manifest content of communication. The corpus addressed in this study includes the contents disseminated in the programs of sports channels in the period from November 20 to December 18, 2022.
Some of the main results of the report indicate that one of the aspects in which there is greater inequality in sports programs is in the diversity of genders present in broadcasts, compared to other television formats (such as news or magazines, for example). Sports cycles demonstrate a comparative presence of cis women and cis men of 10/90 (in percentage terms), while in other cases, such as in the news, it is 40/60.
Likewise, in terms of the roles assumed in the broadcasts, a marked disparity between the two genders is revealed, given that cis women only have a presence in driving practices and as panelists. In the realization of mobile phones abroad – where there are both interviews with protagonists of sports events and fans / fans of the different teams as well as analysis of formations and game strategies – the role is exercised exclusively by cis males. Something similar happens in the exercise of tasks as presenters, specialists or analysts.
The study mentions two genders (cis women and men) since, as is the case with most television formats, sexual and gender diversities are invisible in the formation of work teams and as subjects of discourses.
On the other hand, although football is the sport that has the highest prevalence in the themes of different sports programs and their respective genders, women's football continues to be a topic absent from sports television agendas. In addition, of the 45 programs that make up the corpus of analysis, only one has as its narrative axis the performance of women athletes in disciplines such as swimming and rugby.
The analysis also considered the survey of advertisements for products and services, and concluded that 11% of the 479 records surveyed correspond to commercials of alcoholic beverages. In this sense, it is worth reflecting on the relevance or not of alcohol advertising in media contexts that aim to make sports practices visible, since an association could be incurred between the consumption of this type of products and physical, intellectual performance, etc.
Based on this report, the Observatory of Discrimination in Radio and TV considers it important to establish a frequency that periodically allows comparing progress, changes and challenges in content and its development with the intention of reducing the gender gap. The goal is to expand monitoring to radio programs, and even reach communication through social networks. From this perspective, complex but undoubtedly more representative of the audiovisual world and the current role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), it would be possible to achieve significant improvements in access and representation of women in the media.
