Re-establishing the ‘outsiders’: English press coverage of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup

In 2015, the England Women’s national football team finished third at the Women’s World Cup in Canada. Alongside the establishment of the Women’s Super League in 2011, the success of the women’s team posed a striking contrast to the recent failures of the England men’s team and in doing so presented a timely opportunity to examine the negotiation of hegemonic discourses on gender, sport and football. Drawing upon an ‘established-outsider’ approach, this article examines how, in newspaper coverage of the England women’s team, gendered constructions revealed processes of alteration, assimilation and resistance. Rather than suggesting that ‘established’ discourses assume a normative connection between masculinity and football, the findings reveal how gendered ‘boundaries’ were both challenged and protected in newspaper coverage. Despite their success, the discursive positioning of the women’s team as ‘outsiders’, served to (re)establish men’s football as superior, culturally salient and ‘better’ than the women’s team/game. Accordingly, we contend that attempts to build and, in many instances, rediscover the history of women’s football, can be used to challenge established cultural representations that draw exclusively from the history of the men’s game. In such instances, the 2015 Women’s World Cup provides a historical moment from which the women’s game can be relocated in a context of popular culture

The weekend as a male entity:How Sunday newspaper sports reporting centres around male activities, interests and language (2008 and 2009)

Sport sociologists over recent years have widely agreed that sportswomen are significantly under-represented in sports media. However, the majority of studies have focused on weekday average coverage. This project investigates how sports print media operate in relation to gender at the weekend. Five British Sunday national newspapers were investigated over a two-year period (2008-2009). The quantitative data-set includes 22,954 articles and 25,717 photos which were subject to a content analysis. Of these, 172 news items were inductively analysed into themes, in order to examine in more detail how weekend reporting functions in British newspapers. Findings suggest ongoing differences in the reporting of female and male athletes, particularly in photographic representations of women in sport. Publishing news and photographs of women not related to sport is an original dimension to this investigation, and specific to weekend sports reporting. Moreover, results indicate that Sunday newspapers promote 'the weekend' as a male entity which revolves around viewing sports with other men. The focus on Sunday newspapers provides new insights into how sports media function on a day traditionally associated with leisure, family and 'down time'

‘Nothing to report’: a semi-longitudinal investigation of the print media coverage of sportswomen in British Sunday newspapers

The under-representation of female athletes by print media has been widely acknowledged by feminist media scholars. However, there have been a number of recent studies which suggest that things are changing in terms of progress towards gender equality. In light of such studies this article examines the representation of sportswomen in five British Sunday newspapers, three broadsheets (The Sunday Times, The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph), and two tabloids (the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Express), over a 24-month period (January 2008–December 2009). The results suggest that sportswomen are still overwhelmingly under-represented in British print media