Abstract
Kenya is known globally as the home of world champions in athletics, including the Olympics. However, although the Olympic games dominate public discourse in Kenya when they are being held every four years, there is hardly any academic interest in the many press photographs that are published in this season. The main objective of this study is to analyze how female athletes were photographically represented compared with their male counterparts in the Rio 2016 Olympics in the Kenyan newspapers. I employed quantitative content analysis and semiotic analysis to study Kenya’s two leading daily newspapers, the Daily Nation and the Standard between August 5 and 21, 2016, the time the Olympic games took place. My findings indicate that the two newspapers allocated more photographic space to men compared with women athletes. The findings also show that photographs in this study depicted women as weaker than men, as emotional unlike their logical male counterparts, and generally as inferior to men.
Highlights
Of these there were forty-seven men and forty-two women. From these figures it is clear that the country was represented by an almost equal number of men and women teams in the Rio Olympics. When it came to gender representation in the photographs published in the studied newspapers there was clear imbalance in favor of the men’s team
From the above findings it is clear that Kenyan newspaper photographs are replete with ideological nuances that support the patriarchal status quo
Male and female athletes are well represented at the Olympic games, newspaper editors consciously or unconsciously discriminate against women in their coverage of this https://fembotcollective.manifoldapp.org/read/ada-16-043fcc85-89f5-49c9-b77f-76e03a2b79a9/section/3d17bdb4-e04b-4c4f-b589-e3af7a76e72f
Summary
The main objective of this study was to analyze how female athletes were photographically represented compared with their male counterparts in the Rio 2016 Olympics in the Kenyan newspapers. I was guided by three research questions: 1. How much photographic space was allocated to women athletes as compared with men athletes in the Rio 2016 Olympics?. 2. How were women athletes depicted photographically compared with men in the Rio 2016 Olympics? 3. What ideological nuances were embedded in the women’s photographs in the Rio 2016 Olympics?
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