In the past Sport for Business has done occasional monitoring of the way in which the mainstream Irish sporting media has covered Women’s Sport.
It has been occasional, often born out of frustration, but always intended to point out where improvement could be made.
Ahead of our 2021 Sport for Business Women in Sport Conference we decided to take things to a more advanced level.
Over two days each of Monday to Saturday during the first three weeks of March, selected randomly as time permitted, we analysed the breakdown of the coverage across the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Irish Examiner, The 42 and RTÉ.
The numbers were better than we had expected though may have been boosted beyond the norm by the exceptional performance of Rachael Blackmore at Cheltenham.
Still, the coverage was more diverse than in the past and there were days when it hit 20 per cent of the pagination devoted to sport. That’s still hardly noteworthy when 51 per cent of the population are women but it is a step in the right direction.
The overall average came in at just under 10 per cent with the Irish Independent giving the highest level of coverage.
We included for comparison purposes the English Daily Telegraph and the comparison to what Irish media is producing is encouraging.
We will continue to monitor in this broader fashion over the coming months. We are not professional researchers and the analysis we can provide is not at the same level as much of the research we regularly publish but in order to improve a metric, you have to have a start point. That is all we profess to provide but here are the numbers from March 2021.
Sport for Business Partners
