– Ett magasin om varför det är så få kvinnor som syns i ...

Abstract.
Title: Kontring- a magazine about why so few women are shown in media’s sports coverage
Authors: Cathrine Hofbauer, Josefine Frej, Goldie Lind
Semester: Autumn 2009, UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG, JMG, Department of Journalism, Media and
Communication.
Supervisor: Marina Ghersetti
The investigations purpose: Kontring wanted to investigate why so few women are visible in Swedish media
sports coverage. Before we started our investigation we had a feeling that women not in any way were as
represented as men. We wanted to investigate how it actually was. Our question at issue was ”what does media
sports coverage look like from a gender perspective” We also wanted to know who is made visible, how many
male and female sports journalists there is, and if gender makes any difference to the coverage itself.
Sports are a traditional male territory and, what we believe, an area that falls behind if you compare it with
other subject areas in journalism. We wanted to see if that assumption was true, and if so, find out why.
Method: We chose to do a quantitative study of five media’s sports covering. Newspapers as well as television
and radio. The chosen media are:
Aftonbladet (newspaper)
Dagens Nyheter (newspaper)
Sveriges televison (television)
TV4 (televsion)
Sveries Radio (radio)
We analyzed four weeks in total from every medium. The weeks are spread over the year, to give a greater
picture of the covering and to avoid getting a skewed image in our study. Also, we interviewed one man and
one woman on the editorial staff from every medium that we have investigated.
We have studied gender theory such as Kjønnsteori by Mortensen E. and Egeland C. et al. and tried to use that
as background to our own observations and interviews.
Main results: Our main result is that women are a minority when it comes to sports covering. In general, men
dominate the sports. Sveriges television, TV4 and Sveriges radio have a better distribution in terms of sex, than
Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter. A majority of the sports covered, are team sports, such as football and ice
hockey performed by males. Although when it comes to individual sports, for example skiing, the coverage
more often involves female athletes. It is male journalists that dominate the editorial staff, Dagens Nyheter have
for example only one female sports journalist. Female hosts are quite common, when it comes to broadcasting
media, but the expert role mostly dedicates to men.