Digital Media Frames of Stereotypes Pertaining to Women Coaches: A Textual Analysis of Sport Blog Post Comments

Abstract

Today, there a record number of girls and women participating in sport (Acosta & Carpenter, 2014). However, the number of women in sport leadership, particularly in coaching, has drastically decreased over the past 45 years (Acosta & Carpenter, 2014; LaVoi, 2016). Women also receive very little sport media coverage (2-4%) and often times are trivialized, if and when, they are in the media (Cooky et al., 2013; Kane et al., 2013). With the growing popularity of digital media, this study used framing theory to examine how women coaches are portrayed in digital sport media comments. It examined the comments made in response to three sport blogs posted on the online swim news medium SwimSwam to better understand how women coaches are framed. The sample included 229 comments with 302 total units of analysis. Comments were aligned with LaVoi’s (2016) Ecological-Intersectional Model of Supports and Barriers for Women Coaches to better understand if comments were reproducing or challenging common gender ideologies pertaining to women coaches. The top five themes were women blame the women (22.5%), “blaming” men (19.5%), the unique nature of swimming (10.6%), women can/want to coach (8.3%), and the “best” bias (7.2%). Most comments reproduced common gender ideologies pertaining to women coaches as most aligned with the individual level of the model (57.6%). Findings indicate that digital media continues to marginalize women, creating an environment that does not value or support women coaches.