Women want to play but don’t want to watch TV sports

A new study says women don’t watch TV sports in large part because it takes too much time. (AP photo)

Forty years after the landmark Title IX ruling guaranteed
equal funding for female athletes in college sports, women
continue to gain ground on the field and court. But when
it comes to sports on TV far fewer women are watching.
And a new study (pdf) aims
to figure out why.

The assumption was that a huge increase in female
participation in sports would eventually translate into
more women watching these sports. After all, millions of
boys take part in sports and most of them grow up to
become fans. So here come the girls, right? Not even
close. Female audiences have just not materialized. And if
most women do not watch sports in general, they especially
don’t watch women’s sports like the WNBA.

In a paper university researchers titled “Women (Not)
Watching Women:
Leisure Time, Television, and the Implications for
Televised Coverage,” they did in-depth interviews with
groups of married women, many of whom had played sports in
school, and most of whom had kids.

So why don’t women watch as much sports as men? It
starts with leisure time. Men in general have more
leisure time than married women. Despite the advances
the women’s movement has had in getting men to do more
work around the house, the majority of domestic
responsibilities still fall on the wife/mother, and that
only increases when children arrive on the scene. Simply
put, women feel like they have less time to sit around and
watch a three hour football game.

For a lot of women, there is no such thing as “leisure
time” at home. When they do try to relax, it’s marked by
constant interruptions, often tied to taking care of the
kids. They also tend to worry about all the undone work
during their free time. They also often feel guilty and
selfish if they do try to do something just for
themselves.

The study found men prefer to watch sports attentively
whereas women prefer to watch it in quick snatches, a
little bit here, a little bit there. Unlike men, women
don’t schedule their viewing time around the time a
particular team or game is playing. It’s much more catch
as catch can.

And since time is of the essence for most women, they
prefer concentrated doses of sports, like how networks
cover, say, the Olympics.

The next significant factor, besides not having the time,
is that when women do decide to watch sports, it’s
usually not for their own enjoyment as much as it is a way
for them to connect with their husband and by extension
their family.

In essence, watching sports is domestic work. Hardly a
recipe for encouraging more women to watch more sports.
Women, even former athletes, saw little value in following
women’s sports, especially sports that are traditionally
seen as masculine – especially basketball and football.
They do have a passing interest in gymnastics, figure
skating, cheerleading – sports more often thought of as
feminine.

The study’s authors suggest that many women have a hard
time watching female athletes in traditionally masculine
sports because it clashes with their own images of their
domestic selves.