I wrote "test and the other tasks", so what are the other?
Well, one was to analyse some newspapers, what to analyse and which papers were up to us. My group decided to compare the ratio between women and men in the sports part of eight different papers. We didn't think it would be even, and it wasn't. About 75% of the articles were about men and about 85% were written by men, if I recall correctly. It was interesting to see the ratio between men and women which obviously isn't fair.
Or well, I suppose it's possible that there are almost six times more men than women that would like to write about sports but I doubt it. It's also been proven that people, (in this case being mainly men), prefer to recruit those similar to themselves, (then also mainly men) which feels like a plausible explanation for the odd ratio in my opinion. We had to base all conclusions on pure fact, not guesses so we couldn't write much reasoning down but we did talk a lot about why it was such a huge difference in representation.
From the start we also looked up which sports were mainly written about. We later abandoned that and focused only on men/women but I think you can draw comparisions between the results. Football was the largest sport by far in the papers. Despite that no championship or such is going on at the moment. At least according to those I worked with, who are all interested in football. What do I mean with a comparision? Well, football is the largest sport in the world according to most ways of counting, it's also the sport that most people watch. And I think that what people watch is what really matters. Some of us also thought that the big money also played a large part in it, a lot of football players get sold for ridiculous sums of money.
There's much more interest and money in football than other sports. The same goes for most sports when you compare male to female teams. Fewer people watch female football, and female players get sold for a lot less, at least I think so. And thus they are underrepresented in the newspapers. Sports is entertainment and what most people want to see is what's shown.
So why is it this way?
Well, obviously men are better than women in most sports, but I think there's more to it than that. In Sweden we've got a lot of female stars, and they're just as popular as men. One of the largest newspapers in Sweden has a yearly poll where readers vote about their favourite athlete of the year. Here you can see a list of the results, number one is a woman and six in top ten are women. So far so good, when it comes to Swedish athletes it seems decently fair. But when you look at articles that focus on the sport instead of the athlete it's an entirely different story. There it's all about men.
Will this change? Well, I'm not so sure. As I wrote before there's more money and more interest for men, meaning that there's also more written about men in newspapers. I wonder what's the cause and what's the effect. Do the newspapers write a lot about male sports because people are more interested in it, or are people more interested in male sports because the newspapers write more about it? And will it change?
Who knows ...
But when we discussed in my group we all had the feeling that it is already changing a bit. We all feel like there's more and more women on tv as expert commentators and such. I think that it's quite a long way to go til it's fair but I think all this stuff with working against gender roles that there's a lot of talk about currently in Sweden is helping. "It's becoming more and more accepted for women to be interested in sports and thus more and more women are interested." I know that feminism is a kind of pseudosience according to many, but here I really think that it's doing a great job.
Putting this link to the poll here in case the one in the text didn't work.
http://www.aftonbladet.se/sportbladet/article20073549.ab
Wow, this was a long post, I thought I'd be done before 00.00 for once as I started early. Oh well, perhaps I'll manage with that next Sunday, but knowing myself I probably wont.