Assistant Professor Erin Whiteside is the lead author in an article published in the June edition of Communication, Culture & Critique. The piece is entitled “Women (not) watching women: Leisure time, television and implications for coverage of women’s sports” and investigates the factors in choices women make about watching sports.

The article addresses the assumption about coverage of women’s sports in post Title-IX decades that girls who have played will turn into women who watch, encouraging media producers to provide more women’s sports programming.

As Whiteside, and her co-author, Marie Hardin of Penn State, argue in the paper, that audience has not materialized, leaving women’s sports languishing on the periphery of the sports media landscape. The authors conducted group interviews with heterosexual, married women and found that women may often watch mediated sports as a way to cultivate relationships with the men in their lives, tying their sports media consumption habits with emotional labor. That association may present significant barriers to media producers as they work to cultivate these women into fans of women’s sports. 

Communication, Culture & Critique is one of the International Communication Association’s four published journals. The full citation for the article is below:

Whiteside, E., & Hardin, M. (2011). Women (not) watching women: Leisure time, television and implications for coverage of women’s sports. Communication, Culture and Critique, 4(2), 122-143.