Constructing gender differences: newspaper portrayals of male and female gymnasts at the 2012 Olympic Games

Introduction Scholars from a range of fields such as gender studies, sport management, communication, and sociology have long kept a close watch over the Olympic Games in terms of gender equality, and one area of the Olympics that has been widely studied from a gender perspective is media coverage. Some researchers have found long-standing inequality in terms of the amount of coverage devoted to male and female athletes during the Olympic Games (Billings and Angelini 2007; Billings and Eastman 2003; Burch, Eagleman, and Pedersen 2012; Eastman and Billings 1999; Higgs and Weiller 1994), while other researchers have focused on differences in the type of coverage received by male and female athletes, often finding that gender stereotypes and biases emerged in the language used to describe athletes (Angelini and Billings 2010; Billings 2007; Petca, Bivolaru, and Graf 2012). Most of these comparative studies were quantitative in nature, however, exposing a gap in the literature in terms of qualitative analysis, which can provide richer descriptions of media coverage.