Sexism In College Campus

For examining the hypothesis, ‘There is sexism in the sports section of my local newspaper’, I have selected The Purdue Exponent, since it is an influential newspaper and an important opinion maker of the Purdue campus. The Exponent, a long standing paper since 15 December 1889, is one of the most popular independent student newspapers, widely available on our campus. As a newspaper of long standing reputation, it is published independently as a daily on weekdays during the university semesters by the Purdue Student Publishing Foundation and it covers all relevant local news as well as other noteworthy information regarding important activities of the University campus. It is Indiana’s largest collegiate daily newspaper with a daily distribution

Theoretically, it could be discriminatory against any gender. However, it has generally been observed that sexism in media; is particularly discriminating against women. Thus, my operational definition of sexism as implied and considered for this study is that ‘sports articles related to women were given smaller sections and were placed in comparatively insignificant corners of a given page by the Purdue Exponent as compared to those involving achievements / news related to men’. My definition also covers sexism in the language of the news coverage, as there is a constant usage of generic masculine terms to refer to a mixed group of people, for example - ‘sportsmen’ is used instead of ‘sportspersons’. There are also cases where there is a usage of singular masculine pronoun as the default pronoun, even when referring to a non-specific person and usage of terms ending in ‘ -man’. For example; sportsman, etc in the articles of the

Even within this small sample, the results of my study indicate that sexism is widely prevalent in the coverage of sports news in the Purdue Exponent. Apart from many instances of language with predominantly sexist (male) overtones, the study supports and cements the hypothesis ‘There is sexism in the sports section of my local newspaper’ by the fact that the photographs related to men’s achievements in various sport events are invariably larger and occupy visually significant top portions of the sports pages of the Purdue Exponent. It has been generally observed that articles and photographs pertaining to women achievers and female sportspersons are given significantly smaller and visually less significant sections in the lower half of the same page of the daily newspaper. As such, it is found that the hypothesis ‘There is sexism in the sports section of my local newspaper’ has been found to be true even with respect to an independent student newspaper such as the Purdue