Weekly NDM : Media need to stop portraying women simply as 'touchline totty'

The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/19/media-portraying-women-sports-sexism

The article above focuses on how female athletics are represented in the media and how this has impacted or encouraged females to become more sporty, which means breaking the barriers of dominate female stereotypes. The article questions the role that the media coverage has on this as in some newspapers there is no coverage of women's sporting events. One could argue, that sports is not a typical activity for females as it is stereotyped as being a leisure activity for men and therefore newspapers want to carry on with this tradition, ignoring women. However, even though there is not enough media coverage of women sports in newspaper it does convey to the readers that women are breaking the barriers as they are challenging the stereotypes by taking on male roles and therefore it is more likely to see a female reporter in a football or rugby game. For example in the Gazette newspaper of top 50 sport journalists 2012 only two were females and for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year the entire nominees were males. This conveys, that the mainstream media promote an image of women to have a set of femininity ideas which makes it seem that sports is part of the male domain. Furthermore, another way in which  successful female athletics are being treated unfairly is due to the fact that they are not getting the same status as other male athletics such as David Beckham or Tiger Woods. This clearly highlights that the media are sexist against women as they are taking the traditional view that women should be taking on women should be taking on feminine activities and not going against their female domain. However,The Nation Union of Journalists have made two statements to the MPs committee to stop this inequality which are; untill the back pages of newspapers recognises female athletics and journalists women sports will remain abnormal. Also they argued that sexist views on femininity are not challenge female athletics will not be accepted as being a positive role model for girls.

Overall, in a great extent I agree with this article on how the media coverage of female athletics is unfair and sexist. From reading this article it clearly highlights that we are still living in a society where women are still facing inequality, which in this case is their choice on leisure activities. Furthermore, the newspaper do need to recognise successful female athletics and to give them the equal status as males, as this would positively encourage teenagers  to take on sports and not to be afraid of going against their female domain.