Investigating gender stereotypes in the media : A Natural Language Processing approach to understanding gender disparities in the reporting of football

Abstract: Sports can be an important factor in defining gender identity. However, sports are generally perceived as a masculine activity, especially when they are highly physical. In turn, this negatively impacts women who want to partake in such activities. The most widely watched sport that is perceived to be masculine is football, it reaches billions of people across the world. Since the media is the main source of information for thousands of people who follow football, it is important to understand what part the media play in reproducing gender stereotypes. The aim of this research is to investigate this phenomenon by answering the following research question: In what ways does the media reproduce gender stereotypes when reporting on football? To do that, all articles from the Football section of the British newspaper The Guardian published between 2002 and 2020 were collected. The analysis is divided into twoparts: semantic and syntactical differences. First, a seeded topic model is used to investigate whether the media focuses on different aspects of the sport depending on what gender they reported on. Second, a POS tag analysis is conducted to examine if the media employs different syntax on the coverage of men's and women's football. This is the first large-scale longitudinal study to examine gender differences in the media reporting in sports as well as one of few to use machine learning to analyse gender stereotypes. Findings indicate that both semantic and syntactical differences are prevalent in the reporting. More specifically, results demonstrate that there is a greater focus on female footballers' personallife, where as for male football players the spotlight is on their performances and accomplishments on the pitch. Furthermore, the syntactical analysis indicates that the media uses gendered language more often when reporting on women's football, and utilizes action-packed language when covering men's football. In both semantic and syntactic aspects, the longitudinal analysis demonstrates that the differences are diminishing over time.