Gender Gap in Olympic Television Coverage Shrinks

Researchers at the University of Alabama, the University of Delaware, Utica College in New York, and Auburn University in Alabama, charted the amount of time women’s and men’s sports were shown on NBC’s prime-time network coverage of the Sochi Olympic Games. The results showed that men’s events made up 45.4 percent of the total coverage, women’s events were shown 41.4 percent of the time and events with both men and women (pairs figure skating and ice dancing) took up 13.2 percent of the coverage.

In similar analyses of winter Olympic coverage from 1994 to 2010, there was a 20 percentage point gap in coverage between men and women’s sports. So significant progress has been achieved.