Gender and Sociology

¶ … Men from the Girls: The Gendered Language of Televised Sports, Michael Messner, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, and Kerry Jensen discuss the different ways that men and women are presented in television broadcasts of sporting events. To do this, they analyzed the commentary that accompanied specific gendered sports events: the "Final Four" games of the men's and women's 1989 National Collegiate Athletic Association championships and the mixed doubles matches of the 1989 U.S. Open Tennis Tournament.

What they found is that sports commentators use different types of speech to describe male and female athletes, in a manner that they believed would result in the marginalization of those athletes. They began the article by describing the history of men's and women's sports coverage. What prior research revealed is that men received a greater amount of coverage for sports.

This gives the impression that men are participating in sports to a much greater extent than women, though advances since Title IX have greatly increased the percentage of women participating in sports. Increased coverage, especially on cable channels, seems to be aimed at remedying the disparities in the amount of time spent on men and women's sporting events, but still seems to perpetuate gender stereotypes. The results revealed little overtly sexist comments by the sports commentators, which is an improvement over the results of prior research.

However, there was some subtle sexism. Camera angles framed women as sexual objects in a way that was not done with male athletes. They also referred to women and to men of color in a way that highlighted them as others, such as highlighting gender when referring to female athletes or athletic events, but not when referring to male athletes.

Article Summary: Explaining Age and Gender Effects on Attitudes Towards Sexist Language In their article, Explaining Age and Gender Effects on Attitudes towards Sexist Language, Parks and Roberton explore how various factors, specifically age and gender, impact the attitudes that people have towards sexist language. Their research built upon earlier research that found that different demographic groups had different feelings towards inclusive language, and that these findings seemed to be consistent across studies.

Given that the movement towards inclusive language is relatively new, one might anticipate that older people would be resistant to the inclusive language idea. However, their research found that older people were actually more receptive to inclusive language. Furthermore, women were more receptive to inclusive language than men. What the researchers sought to examine was whether it was actually the ability to empathize, rather than age or gender, themselves, which impacted a person's attitudes towards inclusive language.

Previously, the hypothesis had been that women were more likely to take issue with sexist language because, as women, they could empathize with the idea that a female audience member might feel marginalized by the use of such language. Likewise, the theory suggested that as people aged, through exposure to a larger number of events and circumstances, they became.