Gender Parity in the Olympics

Abstract

Despite claims that the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta were “the Olympics of the Women,” analysis of the producing network’s on-air discourse showed no significant gains in parity for women. Comparison of over 20,000 mentions of names, sports, and associated descriptors in successive Olympics (1994, 1996, 1998) revealed that the proportions of mentions of women and men athletes and women’s and men’s sports stayed at approximately the same imbalanced levels from one Olympics to the next. Despite changes from one producing network to another, despite separate analyses of commentary by hosts and venue reporters and of profiles and promotion, despite comparative analysis of adjectival descriptors, results demonstrated a drop in women’s overall salience in 1996 and no improvement over time. The results demonstrate conflicts between official network goals and their implementation as well as some of the ways network discourse creates conspicuous frames for media events to meet commercial needs.