Anyone notice how women’s basketball kind of ate in 2024? An average of 19 million people tuned in to the women’s tournament this year compared to 15 million for the men’s tournament. You know what else is interesting? The women’s tournament wasn’t even branded as March Madness until 2022. As far as the NCAA was concerned, there was no women’s March Madness before then. Isn’t that weird?
Inequities like this are rampant in the marketing and promotion realm of women’s sports. Algorithms tend to make things worse, not better: when looking up “March Madness viewing figures” on Google for the numbers I used above, I had to scroll through 5 or 6 links before realizing I was going to need to insert the word “women’s” into my search, and that’s post-Caitlyn Clark, not to mention all the Google searches I’ve done of women’s basketball in the past few months. Instagram has finally learned that I like women’s sports and has started putting Lauren James highlight reels on my explore page, but for the average Instagram user, the trend of proportionally tiny women’s sports exposure is maintained.
But what effect does this disparity have, if any, on our perceptions of women’s sports? Could there be what scholars sometimes describe as a “positive” feedback loop with respect to media coverage, where poor and minimal coverage leads to less engagement and investment while less engagement and investment leads to worse coverage? These questions I hoped to address with my research.
I surveyed people from Bloomington and on campus (n = 255 usable responses), covering a wide range of demographics, to answer my question: how does women’s sports content on Instagram affect users’ perceptions of women’s sports? I select Instagram content as my media source because Instagram is widely used in the United States by a very wide range of demographics in a way that, for example, Tik Tok (younger user base) and Facebook (older) aren’t.
I gave respondents two sets of 5 Instagram posts to scroll through, and after each set they respond to prompts intended to gauge their perceptions of women’s sports (henceforth women’s sports perception or WSP). I manipulated the proportion of women’s sports content in each set of posts (either all men’s or all women’s sports) and the quality of the women’s posts. I manipulated “quality” through two different positive frames, one of gender equity advocacy and the other a task-relevant frame mimicking men’s sports coverage generally. I divided WSP into 6 separate aspects, ranging from physical ability of women in sports to the entertainment value of women’s sports, and assigned each aspect its own prompt in my survey.
As it turns out, Instagram posts do impact our women’s sports perceptions as users. In terms of women’s sports content proportion, I find some noteworthy results for both frames. For each of the two frames tested, I observe a significant and positive relationship of an increased proportion of women’s sports content with at least one WSP aspect. Not all frames are created equal however: the gender equity advocacy and task-relevant frames each impact different aspects of WSP.
The gender equity advocacy frame positively impacts the WSP aspects relating to entertainment value and non-gender appropriate sports (I use basketball to represent this category, alternatively defined as traditionally masculine or traditionally inappropriate for female participation). These are aspects that also happened to return the second and third lowest average WSP values of the six. In other words, according to my survey data, the advocacy frame is targeting aspects of user WSP that are particularly low, where people are more likely to have a negative perception of women’s sports.
In contrast, the task-relevant frame positively affects only the WSP aspect relating to gender appropriate sports (I use tennis to represent this category, the inverse of the non-gender appropriate category). This aspect returned the third highest average WSP value, but its average WSP was much closer to the top two aspects than the bottom three, marking it as an aspect with a relatively high baseline WSP. Thus, with the task-relevant frame only impacting the gender-appropriate aspect of WSP, the data indicates that a task-relevant frame really only affects WSP where it’s already high.
With these observations in mind, I conclude that both frames are effective in increasing WSP in Instagram users, especially considering the fact that my treatments consisted of only 5 posts each. Imagine if Instagram gave its users the same amount of women’s sports content as men’s by default? For some users that what be 10, 20, even 40 posts possibly even if our hypothetical user doesn’t like women’s sports at all and remains unaffected by exposure to women’s sports content online. But as the data indicates, even 5 posts is enough. If this finding matches reality, then we have the potential to kickstart a positive feedback loop in a positive direction: more coverage = more engagement and investment = more coverage, etc. Instagram and sports media broadcasters win more of our attention. We as consumers get more sports. Female athletes get to eat on ever bigger stages.
Changing a platform’s content policies is admittedly a daunting task, but we can at least start with already existent policies such as Title IX, under which high school and college athletics accounts for men and women should produce the same quality and quantity of content. A positive feedback loop needs to be kickstarted, and making all schools compliant with this legislation could be enough to get the ball rolling.
David Orth is an environmental science major who loves the outdoors. Outside of school, he has an unreasonably strong passion for soccer, especially for the US men’s and women’s teams, his hometown youth club Cutters, and the professional club Chelsea FC.
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