The language of sports is still highly sexist, according to new research published by the Cambridge University Press.

Experts tested how media and fans talk about men and women in sports, looking at the Cambridge English Corpus (CEC) and the Sports Corpus (multi-billion word databases of written and spoken English language) from a huge range of media sources.

Millions of words relating to the two genders and how they were described in relation to Olympic sports came to show that female athletes get the boot in many ways.

Female athletes are more often compared to male athletes, instead of other great female competitors.

In the CEC, males are referenced two times more than women, a divide which proved even more uneven in the Sports Corpus, where men were mentioned three times more often.

Women were only mentioned more when their participating sport was classified as ‘other,’ as if to say sports in general are inherently male. Cambridge gives the example,

“…we are more inclined to refer to women’s football, whereas men’s football is just called football.”

 

Other areas of attention regarding the difference in jargon for male and female athletes included conversations on:

  • Attire – where women are commonly discussed based on their aesthetic and clothing instead of skill.
  • Marriage and births – returning athletes are prefaced with notable terms not applied to male athletes, including ‘aged’, ‘older’, ‘pregnant’ and ‘married’ or ‘un-married. ’

When it comes to performance, Cambridge found men are paired with verbs like ‘mastermind’, ‘beat’, ‘win’, ‘dominate’ and ‘battle.’ Women are paired with ‘compete’, ‘participate’ and ‘strive.’

“It’s perhaps unsurprising to see that women get far less airtime than men and that their physical appearance and personal lives are frequently mentioned,” said Sarah Grieves, language researcher at Cambridge University Press. “It will be interesting to see if this trend is also reflected in our upcoming research on language used at the Rio Olympics.”

The study by Cambridge University Press reportedly looked at more than 160 million words within the domain of sport using the CEC.