In the article He Is A Laker, She A Looker by Jennifer L Knight and Traci Guilano . It discusses how media plays favorism when it comes to what coverage of sports within the man and women field. It talks about how women had little recognition in stories when it comes to news about their athleticism and more focus on their atrractiveness. However one qoute that brought to my attention when the authors states "Coverage of women’s sport is inferior to that of men’s not only in quantity but in quality as well . Sport commentators and writers often allude or explicitly refer to a female athlete’s attractiveness, emotionality, femininity, and heterosexuality (all of which effectively convey to the audience that her stereotypical gender role is more salient than her athletic role), yet male athletes are depicted as powerful, independent, dominating, and valued because competitively participating in sports is inconsistent with society’s prescribed female role, the media coverage of female athletes seems to be trying to protect female athletes from rejection (or, more cynically, giving the public what they think it “wants”) by emphasizing other aspects of their “femaleness,”
such as their attractiveness Fo,r instance, although Gabrielle Reese, Anna Kournikova, Katarina Witt, and Jan Stephenson are all exceptional athletes, the media often focus on their attractiveness, a problem that
is much less common for male athletes. In effect, the media tend to represent female athletes as women first (i.e., through focusing on their hair, nails, clothing, and attractiveness) and as athletes second; however, male athletes for the most part are portrayed solely in terms of their athleticism."
So I took some athletes magazine cover of sports magazines to empasizes this quote:
As you can see these women are potrayed as house hold indivduals, or attentive to the male gaze compared to the men when being covered in sports magazine they are looked as powerful through their sportmenship
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