Dr. Sandy Montañola
Lecturer at the Department of Journalism at Rennes University, France. Her research focuses on gender in media coverage of sports. She is particularly interested in field work to understand how working conditions influences gender in sports journalism.
Email: sandy.montanola@univ-rennes.fr
Twitter: @smontanola
Making Paris 2024 “the first strictly parity OG in History”, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) focused on gender equality as a defining feature of this edition. This symbolic strategy is not new to the Olympics: The 2012 London edition “were heralded as the ‘Year of the Woman’ as every delegation sent one female athlete to compete” and the 2021 Tokyo event was “the first OG of History to respect the principle of gender balance”. Such angle also provided an opportunity for journalists to treat the OG under the light of gender. Here, we explore if the media talked and how they talked about gender-related issues during the event.
A subject imposed by polemics
We found that, ahead of the OG, media discussed the evolution of the presence of women in order to verify the IOC declarations. Other topics that emerged were demands made by female athletes about outfits and maternity. However, media coverage of gender-related issues only emerged as polemics that happened during the Olympic Games. We selected two: the camera framing of naked body parts of women athletes, and the sexist comments made by journalists.
During the IOC daily press conference on July 28th, Yiannis Exarchos, chief executive of Olympic Broadcasting System (OBS), IOC subsidiary that provides images to media rights holders, answered about gender-related concerns: “Unfortunately, in some events, [women] are still being filmed in a way that you can identify that stereotypes and sexism remains, even from the way in which some camera operators are framing differently men and women athletes”. He explained that sexualization was a result of camera operators being “mainly males” and that they could differentially film male and female athletes because of an “unconscious bias”.
The content of this conference was taken up the next day by media outlets from all over the world as a progress, presenting the words of Yiannis Exarchos as a break with an unequal past. The trigger of such declaration is a controversy around sexist framing, but media widely echoed OBS’s position about operational measures in place for an egalitarian coverage or for parity within teams with specific training for women. Media outlets also referred to the IOC guidelines(2018; 2021; 2024) which underline “the importance of treating women’s competitions with the same approach as those of men, focusing on their performance rather than the aesthetics of the athletes”.
Different discourses that coexist in the media
The fact that the same framing was found in media outlets around the world can be explained by the replication of Agence France Presse coverage. Media narratives ahead of the OG seems to coexist with various gender controversies without questioning the IOC’s narrative about parity.
In fact, the lack of media memory do not seem to allow the IOC’s declarations to be put into historical perspective: the analysis of previous OG allows us to observe that in 2021, in Tokyo, Yiannis Exarchos declared: “You will not see in our coverage some things that we have been seeing in the past, with details and close-up on parts of the body.” A Canadian title headlined “Olympic broadcasters want to put an end to sexualized images of athletes”. However, the 2024 media coverage presents the OBS’ declaration as an act aimed at triggering a change in “ways of filming”: “Olympics camera operators urged to avoid ‘sexism’ in filming female athletes“, or even “the camera operators finally ordered to film in a non-sexist way.” This angle seems to come from the individualization made by OBS attributing such sexualized frames to certain male operators and to the presupposition that women will produce not stereotyped images. We found the same process in the case of sexist comments. They are treated as an individual error, as in the case the article “Top 10 sexist remarks heard at the Rio Olympics” and, more recently, in Bob Ballard media coverage.
The OG has favored an individual angle rather than a structural perspective. As a result, production conditions, such as sponsors’ expectations and commercial pressure from audiences which push for sexualization, are not taken into consideration. In the same way, difficulties to integrate female journalists (which corresponded to only 20% of the accredited professionals in Tokyo) are not taken into account. While the OBS has 53% of male and 47% of female journalists, this only represents the 160 permanent employees of the company. But OBS is “by far, the largest contingent among all accredited media” in Paris with 8,300 temporary staff, and the gender balance within the technical teams, including camera operators, are not equal. The conditions and short-term contracts are unfavorable to women (Decree no. 2023-1078 of November 23) and unfavorable to capitalize action in order to avoid sexism.
The media coverage of gender-related issues during the OG could appear as a paradox since OG are the most favorable event to media coverage of female athletes (far from the 10% of global coverage during ordinary times). As we found, to be covered, gender inequalities must be 1/ pointed by female athletes or 2/ revealed by a particular polemics during the event. In that perspective, social media can be considered as a good sentinel to detect inequality between male and female athletes, but the narrative of the institutions seems to impose themselves in the tempo of the OG.
