Episode 71: Cheryl Cooky Looking Into 4% Sports Media Coverage

November 14, 2019
Cheryl Cooky is associate professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Purdue University. She has been involved with the longitudinal study on the quantity and quality of men’s and women’s sports in media from which the stat 44% of athletes are women and only 4% of media coverage is about women comes. That stat launched Hear Her Sports and Cheryl joins the podcast to look more deeply into the findings.

This episode is important because we talk about why studying and thinking about sports is important (and not as frivolous as it might seem).

In the episode as Cheryl also gets into the history of women in sports and the legacy of fear of masculinization of women participating in sports, media coverage of Caster Semenya from as far back as ten years ago, and sports coverage of day to day women’s sports and of special events like the Olympics and World Cup soccer.

Cheryl Cooky
The Female Athlete: Missing in Action, Cheryl Cooky, TEDxPurdueU
Game On (movie)
Media Coverage & Female Athletes (movie)
No Slam Dunk, Gender, Sport and the Unevenness of Social Change
Women Play Sport, But Not on TV: A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media, Cooky, Messner, Hextrum
IAAF, International Association of Athletics Federation
IOC, International Olympic Committee

If you like this episode, you may also enjoy:
🎤 Episode 43 Colette Smith on women’s football. Listen Here.
🎤 Episode 58 Jen Gurecki athlete, entrepreneur, on female athletes in the media. Listen Here.
🎤 Episode 44 Margo Burke, teenage girl who knows about equity. Listen Here.