quality:corruption
Media coverage

Media coverage for women's sports is significantly less than the coverage for men's sports. Substantial research indicates that women's sports and female athletes gain only a small fraction of sports media coverage worldwide. Research that has examined why this is the case suggested this can be attributed to three particular factors that govern sports newswork: the male-dominated sports newsroom, ingrained assumptions about readership, and the systematic, repetitive nature of sports news. In 1989, a study was conducted that recorded and compared the amount of media coverage of women's and men's sports on popular sports commentary shows. Michael Messner and his team in 2010 analyzed three different two-week periods by recording the amount of time that the stories were on air and the content of the stories. After recording sports news and highlights, they wrote a quantitative description of what they saw and a qualitative description of the amount of time that story received.

For three decades, it has been commonly believed that women’s sports receive significantly less media coverage compared to men’s sports, with historical estimates ranging from 3% to 5.5% of total sports coverage. In 2022, despite 70% of people watching women’s sports, only 16% of sports media coverage was dedicated to these events. To better understand the media presence of women’s sports, Wasserman’s Collective and Global Insights Team, in partnership with ESPN Research, analyzed data from 2018 to 2022, including coverage from 100 linear TV networks, major streaming services, prominent sports media social accounts, and various digital publications. This analysis aimed to provide a more accurate picture of the media environment for women’s sports in the U.S., focusing on broad sports coverage outlets and excluding those that might skew coverage toward specific sports.