ABSTRACT
When Title IX was implemented in the US in 1972 with the aim of removing sexual discrimination in educationally based athletic programs receiving federal funds, there was a dramatic increase in female participation in school and college sport. In spite of contradictory effects in the following years (Hargreaves, 1994; Hult, 1989; Billings, 2000), Messner (2002) observes that there continues to be a surge of female athletic participation and correlative interest levels, something O’Reilly and Cahn (2007) describe as a “spectacular transformation ... in which the right to play sports and receive resources commensurate with men’s sports is rarely disputed” (pp. xi-xii). Nonetheless, there is a notable discrepancy between active female participation in sport and the portrayal of girls and women within media sport. In the US, for example, ESPN’s SportsCenter1 routinely focuses on women’s athletics at a less than 2 percent rate (Adams and Tuggle, 2004; Eastman and Billings, 2000); and even in mainstream newspapers, such as the New York Times, less than 10 percent of their sports space is devoted to women (Eastman and Billings, 2000).
