Pinning down the gap: gender and the online representation of professional tennis players

Abstract

Sport is a powerful social institution where hegemonic masculinity is constantly constructed and naturalised through the positioning of physicality and athleticism alongside maleness. Female athletes continue to be sub-ordinated by means of under-representation and trivialising gender discourses. So far, the extensive discussion of gendered language in sports media has primarily focussed on identifying the manifestations of gender bias in traditional news media. There has been little endeavour to explore the language of online media and tournament organisers. This study addresses that gap by comparing online gender representations of tennis players during the Wimbledon Championships 2018 on five online news websites and the tournament website. It also contributes to existing literature by providing corpus evidence of gender bias in sports media. The corpus consists of 1,622 articles (1,076,475 tokens). Findings from frequency, collocation and concordance analysis indicate that despite some instances of gender-neutral representations, female players are prone to gender marking and gender-bland sexism on all websites. I argue that the challenges women face relate to the tension between femininity and athleticism, and the misguided belief that women need to but can never eliminate the muscle gap.