How One Innocuous Study Spun Out of Control

To summarize: A paper published in Communication, Culture and Critique examining the sports-watching habits of 19 women concluded that one reason women's sports are still struggling to gain an audience is that women don't have as much time to spend on sports as men, mostly because they're busy running the vacuum under their husbands' feet as they watch the game. When the interviewed women do watch sports, it's in the context of "family time," which means, unsurprisingly, that the teams they watch are the husbands' favorites. In short, women are still deeply unequal on the domestic front. I know, I'm surprised too.

 

The problem really started with reporting in the Los Angeles Times that took this rather feminist study and skewed it so that it read more like a click-happy reaffirmation of the sexist belief that women's disinterest in sports is the result of something being wrong with women, and not with society or sports culture. The headline ("Wives Watch Sports for Husband's Sake, Study Reports") and the initial paragraphs paint a picture of women pretending to like sports to impress men, which in turn triggered pre-existing audience stereotypes about how women are too stupid to know what a "down" is. It wasn't until paragraph seven that the writer, Monte Morin, got around to discussing how the study wasn't actually about women only pretending to like sports, and was in fact more about how women don't have the time nor really the interpersonal power to be the dominant sports fans in their households. Even then, Morin downplayed the actual conclusions to play up a narrative of women who are so invested in man-pleasing we'll be bored silly for hours pretending to care about those sports that are too complex for our lady brains to grasp.

[...]