“You Throw Like a Girl!”: A Sociological Analysis of Media Representation and Viewership of Women’s Sports

Abstract

Motivated by the sociological theories of Symbolic Interactionism and Contemporary Feminism, this research explores the intersections of gender, the media, and sports on a southeastern college campus. Undergraduate students were recruited from various sections of Introduction to Sociology to complete a 38-question survey administered through Qualtrics. The final sample size was 85 (n = 85). Bivariate analyses were conducted using RStudio and SPSS simultaneously, and any relationship that was found to be significant (p = .05) was analyzed using a Cramer’s V coefficient test to determine the strength of association. Trends that stood out in the research were 1) There are differences in perspective between men and women college students; 2) There are not many differences in opinion between those who participate in sports and those who do not; and 3) There were differences between viewership frequency (this could also be tied to the amount of sports coverage watched by each gender, however, multivariate analysis was not conducted).