Gender equality in media representation of sport in Ireland

The Federation of Irish Sport & Dr Anne O’ Brien, Maynooth University.

Sport is a powerful tool for social inclusion and the creation of community, but research shows that women are systematically excluded from sports coverage in the media. While certain individual sportswomen or some teams are acknowledged for their achievements, as a cohort, women are still denied legitimacy in sports media. This occurs in three ways, through representation practices, through assumptions about women as an audience for sports content and through the fact that women constitute a minority of media workers within sports content production.