SPORT BUSINESS OBSERVATORY – On this International Women’s Rights Day, find Aurélie Lienhart’s analysis on the place of women’s sport.
Aurélie Lienhart is a member of the Think Tank of the Sport Business Observatory where she deals with societal issues and innovation. She is also a partner of the firm In&Sport whose vocation is to provide analyzes and decryptions on the evolution of sport, both in its economic and social dimension.
Despite a rise in audiences linked to women’s sports competitions, these only represent barely a fifth of the hours broadcast. And what about the notoriety of our champions, a determining factor in making young girls want to invest? What about their economy or that of their clubs? Without necessarily becoming teledependent, like its male counterpart, women’s sport needs the light of the media to develop. And if the solution was through the public media?
In 2021, women’s sport represented barely 20% of sports broadcasts on screens, while between 2017 and 2022, the top 20 best audiences for women’s competitions are made up of 14 football matches, 3 handball matches and 3 rugby matches for audiences of between 2.2 and 10.7 million viewers. Women’s sport brings people together but it has yet to be the subject of initiatives such as “Women’s sport always*” which takes place over a week in February. But what about the other 51 weeks of the year? And the subject of this media coverage should not stop at the simple retransmission of competitions. So what is the role of the media and in particular those of the public service in the promotion of women’s sport?
The gap with men’s sport is still significant and seems difficult to close
This is a trend that we have seen since 2012 when women’s sport only had a rate of 7% media coverage. We find it today in the radio, television and press media, but with annual variations that depend on the competitions, the sports and, of course, the results of the French women. But the gap with men’s sport is still significant and seems difficult to bridge. Especially since we start from afar for the highlighting of the sports performances of our female athletes.
French team sports teams have had very good results and have generated significant visibility and good audiences, but mainly achieved on DTT channels or on “double channels” of major media, as for the European championship handball which aired on TMC. Before the final, the major channels are very little interested in broadcasting qualifying matches, regardless of their sporting quality or the resulting result.
And yet, to change the mentalities and representations of the general public in relation to women’s sport, it would be necessary to be able to invest in more recurrent and followed media coverage, while not only focusing on sporting results but also allowing the practice to be anchored women in use, to raise the question of equal representation in the governing bodies of sport, equality and gender diversity in certain events, and how to integrate female subjects into sport. .
89 sports federations have adopted a plan for the feminization of practitioners and leaders
Sport has chosen to invest in the development of women’s sport. 89 sports federations have adopted a plan for the feminization of female practitioners and leaders, a law was passed at the beginning of 2022 to establish parity in the governing bodies of sport from 2024. And these actions are starting to bear fruit, as for the French basketball federation, which is experiencing a significant increase in the number of licensees for the 2021-2022 season (+19.6% excluding COVID impact) and women’s rugby has recorded an increase in the number of licensees since September 2021 (+22.12% excluding COVID impact).
The medals at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games are necessarily not for nothing, their highlighting in the media landscape having strongly contributed to this. If the practice of sports by women is increasing, the desire to see more of them in the media is also very present. A survey carried out by Odoxa in 2019 tends to show this. This means that there is a demand among the French public and therefore targets that the media can attract with appropriate content.
The choice and intensity of media coverage is primarily up to the media industry. And this is where we can enter a virtuous circle for women’s sport. Between male and female sport, there is a two-speed economy which is partly induced by the lack of media coverage: the less a sport is visible in the media, the less easy it is to sell it, to attract sponsors and spectators and to develop merchandising around a team or an athlete. This explains why women’s sport in France is very little professionalized, apart from a few football or handball teams, and it benefits rather from a semi-professional status.
The retransmission of women’s competitions increasingly profitable for broadcasters
However, with the success of French women and the desire to see more and more, programs retransmitting women’s competitions are becoming more and more profitable for broadcasters. The relationship between the amount of television rights and advertising revenue has become interesting for them because advertising revenue exceeds the cost of purchasing broadcasting rights. Which is not necessarily always the case in men’s competitions. An audiovisual group like France Télévision with its public service mission also has a role to play in democratizing the presence of women’s sport on the airwaves, such as by imposing quotas on competitions.
Especially since, if the competitions are increasingly popular, the rate of female journalists and/or columnists has increased between 2019 and 2020 (18% in 2020 against 9% in 2019). Similarly, the rate of women other speakers on sports TV shows increased between 2018 and 2020 (23% in 2020 compared to 15% in 2018). This also contributes to the progression of the media coverage of women’s sport because it is not only about women’s sport but about the place of women in sport, whether we are talking about women’s or men’s competitions.
Female journalists can bring a more egalitarian treatment of sport because there is always a differentiated treatment between male sport and female sport. When dealing with sports stories, journalists tend to dwell more on the extra-sporty and compare performances to those of men, as if male performances were supposed to be the norm. But it helps to reinforce stereotypes. However, putting more women’s sport forward in all the media, leaving room for female journalists and their athletes would encourage the emergence of role models with a voice that is heard by the general public and not only on related subjects. to their athletic performance.
Considerable economic and media potential
This is already the case with judoka Clarisse Agbégnénou, who shared her pregnancy a few days ago but also her desire to be present at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, multi-medal Olympic mogul skier Perrine Laffont who , in addition to dominating his discipline, has also invested in subjects around ecology…
All this tends to prove that women’s sport certainly still has a long way to go, but that the athletes, national teams and professional clubs involved in women’s competitions are recording significant progress in terms of revenue generation and viewership. There is indeed considerable economic and media potential for future years around women’s sport, which the progressive enthusiasm of the public and the growing interest of the media should help to reinforce.
And since the rights to men’s competitions monopolize most of the investment capacity of private broadcasters, then the public media (France Television like Radio France) have a card to play to both accelerate this trend, introduce our champions, make their partners “visible”, in order to encourage vocations and thus play their public service role to the full!
* Operation which was launched in 2014 and which contributes over a week, to the media coverage and promotion of women’s sport, by encouraging the audiovisual media to offer on their antennas more programs around women’s sport, more sports broadcasts but also more topics, shows and interviews dedicated to women’s sport.
