Women’s sports : A discourse analytic investigation into the representation of women in sports media

Abstract: Language is affected by the society in which it is used. Men and women have not had the same status in society, which means that the language used about them may potentially be different. A domain in society that was created for men is sports, yet, nowadays women also feature in sports. The aim of this study is to explore how women and their performances in sports are represented in newspapers. Previous research in the field of language, gender and sports has found that women are not depicted in the same way as men (Lundquist Wanneberg, 2011; Bissel, 2006; Segrave, McDowell and King III, 2006). To study how women are represented in sports articles, six articles about female athletes were analyzed through Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis was based on Fairclough and Wodak’s (2010) framework that focuses on the domains of representation, relations and identities. These domains were divided into five categories: terms used to refer to the athletes, attributes, performance, sport descriptions and emotions. This allowed an analysis which showed how the world of sports views women, how women are represented as athletes, and the relation between the athletes and their sports. The analysis showed that women are depicted as ‘female’ athletes, not just athletes. This could be found through the usage of, for example, the noun and possessive marker women’s, which is used as a premodifier to describe the sports throughout the texts. It was also found that the world of sports is normally one where men are active and therefore it had to be explained when women were excellent at their sport, even when compared to men. This could be found through the usage of explanatory language, which clearly stated that the female athletes in question are or can be better than men.