Despite gains made by Title IX in the past 38 years, including increased female
participation in high school and collegiate sport, there is evidence that gender equity in sport is not fully achieved. Gender and racial discrimination in sport remains rampant, and sports media continue as a leading arena for the reproduction of dominant, traditional images of gender and race and of inequality between the sexes and races (Sage, 1990; Smith, 2007). This study conducted a content analysis of photographs in the editorial (N=2,403) and advertising (N=1,490) content and of sources in feature articles (N=315) in Sports Illustrated Kids to determine whether these visual images and feature articles reflect actual participation rates in athletic competition based on gender and race and whether the number of images of women in the magazine have increased during the magazine’s second decade of publication, 2000 to 2009.
This study found that women continue to be vastly underrepresented within the magazine’s pages. Photographs featuring men were found to vastly outnumber those featuring women in SIK editorial and advertising photographs by a ratio of more than 7 to 1 (87.6% to 12.4%) and by a ratio of nearly 4 to 1 (79.7% to 20.3%), respectively. As far as a racial difference, African and European athletes have equivalent coverage in editorial photographs, but racial minority athletes (African, Asian, and Hispanic) are still fighting for representation in advertising photographs and as sources in feature articles. Of editorial and advertising photographs, 52.1% and 27.8% depicted racial minority athletes, respectively. Similarly, only 21.1% of articles were stories for which the dominant subject(s) were female athletes or female-specific sports teams, whereas 30.9% of articles featured racial minority athletes as the dominant subject.