Published: 15 March 2013
Region: UK
One of the leading UK newspapers, the Guardian, dropped its weekly column on women’s football. The reason, says the Guardian’s sport editor Ian Prior, it is lack of interest.
In the same time, as the very same Guardian reports it, “women on the sports pages or rather the lack of them, is a regular cause for complaint by readers”.
“It would seem that no women across the UK managed to achieve anything sportswise this weekend, apart from publicise a new clothing line,” one reader wrote recently.
The Guardian‘s sports desk says it would like to give women more coverage but, apart from sports such as tennis, athletics and track cycling, where women are given broadly equal billing, the interest in women’s sports is not there: people don’t pay to watch it live, or watch it on television or read about it in any great numbers.
We came in for praise for the attention paid to women during the Olympics, but their disappearance from the sports pages after the closing ceremony drew some criticism. “Surely women don’t just take part in sport every four years?” asked one reader, reports the newspaper.
“When there are signs of increasing popularity in a women’s sport we try to react to that,” Prior says. “But it’s difficult to keep putting things up that aren’t being read.”
About 50% of the Guardian’s sports coverage is devoted to football played by men. And that figure would be even higher, Ian Prior says, if editors were entirely governed by market forces: probably 75% of resources and coverage would go to football and 25% to everything else.
It’s not just women’s sport that loses out because its readership is dwarfed by that for men’s football, cricket and rugby.
“I would love to do more women’s sport,” says Prior. “I would love to do more rugby league, horse racing and other sports. It would be great to have an unlimited budget, but we haven’t, and we have to produce what people read.”
Some could argue though, that if media cover woman in sport better than the audience would be more interested in it.