Women’s sport begins to gain a foothold in the media

This Tuesday we presented the second edition of the study ‘The visibility of women’s sport in the media’, a study analyzing the media visibility of women’s competitions compared to men’s competitions. The study now in its second year and carried out together with Rebold, shows that there has been an increase of 22% in the number of news articles about women’s competitions featured in the media. This figure represents an increase of almost 8 points above those recorded last year, where news coverage of women’s sporting events in Spain stood at just 14%.

During the presentation of this year’s report, Laura Corvo, Managing Partner, APPLE TREE Madrid, highlighted the effort that the media were making to cover more and more news about women’s sports, but added “there is still a big gap”. Even in the coverage of events where there is the presence of a sportswoman and a sportsman – such as the Ballon d’Or award ceremony – “we see a clear difference in the number of news items that were published mentioning only Alexia Putellas (winner of the women’s Ballon d’Or for the second consecutive year) – just over 17% compared to 65% – and the news items that talked only about the men’s winner, Karim Benzema,” Corvo pointed out during the presentation.
In regard to the media, according to the research, the focus on having journalists specialized in writing about women’s competitions and the greater support from brands for these competitions, is having a positive effect and is increasing the share of voice in the media compared to men’s competitions.
In addition, the report analyzed television audiences of some of the most high-profile sports competitions (football, basketball, and tennis) in the year 2022. The analysis shows the difficulties that women’s football still has in attracting the attention of television audiences. However, in other sports such as basketball, the gap between male and female competitions is much smaller. If you would like to know more about this research, we invite you to download the study using this link.