Women (Not) Watching Women: Leisure Time, Television, and Implications for Televised Coverage of Women's Sports

Abstract

This research explores the factors in choices women make about watching sports. The assumption about coverage of women's sports in post-Title IX decades has been that girls who have played will turn into women who watch, encouraging media producers to provide more women's sports programming. Yet that audience has not materialized, and women's sports have languished on the periphery of the sports media landscape. Using focus-group discussions with heterosexual, married women, we argue that sports media consumption is tied to gender roles and related domestic work. That association with emotion labor presents significant barriers to the cultivation of these women as fans of women's sports.