How many times have you heard that "women's soccer is neither soccer nor women's soccer"? Take out soccer and put in any other sport. Except for rhythmic gymnastics and figure skating, which, yes, are sports "for girls", the rest are for men. The skaters, poor things, are under suspicion?
The Directorate of Sports of the Basque Government recently published a study on the presence and treatment given to women's sports in the general and specialized press.
91% male sport
Take a look. Of the 15,316 sports news items analyzed, 91.44% correspond to male sports. Exclusively female sports news did not even reach 5. More data, 40.4% of the female sports news are brief and do not include a photo. It seems that these women do not have surnames, because they are often stripped of them and referred to only by their first name. When they are interviewed in depth, they are asked about their motherhood, their husbands and family life. In their case, the professional aspect is always emphasized.
One of the problems of women's sports is the public, well, rather the absence of public. Everything is a chain: tickets are not sold because spectators do not attend, sponsorships are not obtained because their repercussion will be small and the aids are scarce, or null, because, we return to the beginning, the public and the media turn their backs to women athletes. A dark future awaits us with this. Unless we win the most important championships, and even then we get little coverage, we will not appear in the media.
Those who deny visibility to women athletes are denying them the possibility of encouraging other women to make a living from and through sport.
They are denying women who strive every day to prove that we can do it too. And we want to.
It is not strange thatwhen a photograph is published along with the information of a female sporting success, it is more of a posing than anything else. Well, no, when we finish a test and we take pictures, which we then publish, we do not want to appear as if we were coming out of a wedding. We want our effort to be seen. We're not made up, we don't have our hair done. We are sweaty and sometimes exhausted, but we don't care. Having managed to finish a training session or an event is the prize.
A special March 8
On this March 8, on this Women's Day, which will become the largest mobilization of women in history, I wanted to focus on the presence of sportswomen in the media. Making women's sports visible is one of the important tasks ahead of us if we want future generations to have physical activity among their priorities. Otherwise, today's girls will find themselves without sporting references to invite and encourage them to live in a sporting way.
Today, as always, I am a woman. I am sport.
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