Women have come a long way in the fight for equality – in the 1970s women fought for things like equal pay and equal opportunities in the workplace, yet this is still an issue today. This is even relevant to sport as sportsmen earn more than sportswomen for doing the same job. For years’ gender inequality has plagued professional sports, with people suggesting women’s sport is of a lower quality and women will never be as good as their male counterparts.
On my cover I decided to blow up a picture of Olympic gold medallist Caster Semenya. She is the perfect example of a woman in sport, who has received a tremendous amount of backlash for being a female athlete. Her abilities are constantly being questioned by society, especially internationally.
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Current tennis number one, Andy Murray corrected John Inverdale from the BBC for saying he was the first to win two back-to-back gold medals at the Olympics, when in fact Venus and Serena Williams had already done so.
Paul Newberry received a lot of backlash for an article he wrote for the Associated Press, with a massive headline on Michael Phelps’ silver medal win, while swimmer Katie Ledecky had won gold and only received a small headline running below the main one.
A study by Cambridge University Press shows the clear gender disparity in the language of sport. It revealed the discrepancies in how male and female athletes are talked about in the media. The study looked into over 160 million words within the domain of sports using the Cambridge English Corpus.
They concluded that language around women in sport focused mostly on appearance, clothing and their personal lives – relationship status, whether they are married or un-married and even pregnant.
For men, words like “fastest”, “strong”, “big”, “great” and “real” were often used.
Coming back to my own investigation using four daily newspapers in Cape Town, too concluded that women’s sport is shockingly