Summary of Gender and Media

• Men's sports receive well over 80 percent of the coverage in all the media (Duncan and Messner, 1998)

• Big city newspaper coverage of women's sports is less than 15 percent of the sports section (Urquhart and Crossman, 1999)

• ESPN popular sports news program, SportsCenter, devotes about 3 percent of its daily coverage to women athletes (Messner et al., 1999)

• Coverage of women's sports through the 1980s and most of the 1990s contained commentaries that often highlighted the personal characteristics of the athletes, such as their attractiveness, their spouses and children, their domestic interests and skills, and their vulnerabilities and weaknesses (Eastman and Billings, 1999; Weiler and Higgs, 1999)

• Over the years, men have been featured on about 90 percent of the covers of Sports Illustrated, and half of the women featured on SI covers have not even been athletes (Davis, 1997)