With the 2015 Women’s World Cup only 33 days away, it is astonishing to see the amount, or lack of, media attention it has received amongst the Australian press.
Our beloved Matildas rank 10th in the world, and where other nations websites and newspapers are full of coverage on the upcoming tournament, the Australian press are shamefully silent, something that does not come as a surprise.
The truth is that coverage of women’s sport has actually gone backwards in the last four years, and a recent report by the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) reported that in Australia, women’s sport accounted for only seven percent of total television coverage and six percent of written news coverage. It is expected that this figure will get lower with the recent ABC axing of the W-League and the WNBL.
It was reported by the Women in sport Broadcasting Analysis that horse racing received more television air time than women’s sport between 2012 and 2014, a fact that as a proud sporting nation, we should feel ashamed about.
There have been many academic journals written on this topic, a regular topic in the high school curriculum that discusses the notions of masculinity and gender bias in sport, everybody seems to know about it and yet little is done to improve it.
There are a number of reasons why, the main being that the Australian media and sponsors have this misconception that the public do not want to know about women’s sports – including football, which is totally untrue.
The 2011 Women’s World Cup was at the time the most tweeted event in the history of Twitter, and yet still there are no courageous media executives out there brave enough to appreciate the popularity of the women’s game and get behind it.
With the advancements in sport science, coaching and management women’s sport has become a better product and sporting bodies, the Australian media and sponsors should realise this. Unfortunately, they will not until the Australian public encourage them to balance their coverage.
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Lastly, the people making the decisions in Australian sport such as Football Federation Australia do not do a very good job of marketing their product, leading this to become a vicious cycle. Poor marketing leads to poor media coverage, which leads to lack of sponsorship, which leads to poor media focus and thus the cycle starts again.
The reason why women’s sport coverage has gone backwards is because events like horse racing are more heavily promoted and of course this is said with tongue in cheek, but if we as a nation do not convince the powers that be that women’s sport is more important than the four legged kind, our Matildas will never grace the back page.
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