This was Women in Sport Week, highlighted by International Women’s Day on Wednesday and a period in which Women’s sport and sporting organisations put their best foot forward to highlight programmes and events, teams and tournaments that could inspire future generations to see sport as being for them.
On Sport for Business we have covered these efforts extensively, as we do 52 weeks of the year. It is the right thing to do, to give extra oxygen to those areas of sport that need it most.
But how did the mainstream media do?
In the graphs above we show that the Irish Times had 11.1 percent of its sports coverage devoted to Women’s sport, the Irish independent seven percent and the Irish Examiner 8.1 percent.
Vera Pauw was out and about, Leona Maguire was hosting events, AIG hosted a day with Dublin GAA where each of the four codes were represented but still the representation of Women’s sport was only just able to nudge into double figures with one of our main daily national newspapers.
It is up on previous surveys but we had hoped for more when the focus across so much of the sporting infrastructure was highlighting Women’s games, teams, and stars.
We will continue to monitor and hope for the best. Would we or should we be happy that between seven and eleven per cent in a binary equation can be considered to be equal?
