Women get far less airtime than men and their physical appearance and personal lives are frequently mentioned.
- Sarah Grieves
The research draws on the Cambridge English Corpus and the Sports Corpus – multi-billion word databases of written and spoken English from a huge range of media sources – which also highlight a pronounced gender divide when it comes to the way sporting men and women are discussed.
Academics found that in the Cambridge English Corpus ‘men’ or ‘man’ is referenced twice as much as ‘woman’ or ‘women’, but in the Sports Corpus (a sub-section of words in relation to sport) men are mentioned almost three times more often than women.
Meanwhile, language around women in sport focuses disproportionately on the appearance, clothes and personal lives of women, highlighting a greater emphasis on aesthetics over athletics.
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Image: Jessica Ennis wins gold at the London 2012 Olympics
Credit: Al King via Flickr
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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