Less than 3% of photographs of sport in the newspapers show women playing sport.

This means that we are 33 times more likely to see a man playing sport in the newspapers than a woman.

#SeeSportyBeSporty is a campaign calling for sport in the media to be more gender equal.

The background

We use running to build girls' confidence in sport, exercise and life. We know from the work we do that by year 3 (age 7) girls are 22% less likely than boys to call themselves “very sporty”. But is it any wonder? If girls don’t see sporty role models, how will they know that being sporty is an option for them? If they can’t see it, it’s much harder for them to be it.

Back in 2014, the “No More Page 3” campaign looked at photographs in the Sun newspaper. In 6 months there wasn’t one photo of a woman playing sport. It’s 2018, but are things any better? And what about the other newspapers?

The research

One day a month for a whole year we bought the most popular UK newspapers and counted the photos in them.

How many of their photos were of women?

How many of those were women playing sport?

The results

Based on our sample…

64% of all photos in newspapers are of men

17% of photos in newspapers are of someone playing sport

Less than 3% of those are of women

The worst       

1 in 5 photos in the Sun are of people playing sport. 0.8% of those are of women.

In one edition of the Sun that we looked at there were 86 photos of men playing sport and none of women.

The best

10% of the Guardian’s sports photos are of women playing sport.

The Daily Telegraph had the most pictures of women playing sport in any one edition we looked at. 7 of the 48 photos that day were of women playing sport. These were of Wimbledon and Athletics.

In the editions we looked at in September 2017 there was only 1 photo of a woman playing sport across all the papers we looked at. There were 365 of men.

Almost 2/3 of the editions we looked at had not one photo of a woman playing sport. Those editions had an average of 30 photos of men playing sport.

What message is that sending to girls (and boys) about gender and sport?

And more importantly, are you okay with that?

We think sports coverage in the media should be more gender equal. If you agree, sign this petition, like, share and use the hashtag #SeeSportyBeSporty to spread the word.