While France will face Sweden live this Friday evening on TF1 for the semi-final of the Handball World Cup, would it be the same if it were a women’s competition? A study presented by Arcom (Audiovisual and digital communication regulatory authority) this Thursday, January 26, 2023 reveals that sportswomen are more and more present on television. But they are still underrepresented compared to their male counterparts.
In total, women’s sport represented 2,350 hours of broadcast on the small screen for the whole of 2021. But this is nothing compared to the tidal wave represented by men’s sport with its 36,284 hours of broadcast in 2021, i.e. 74.2% of all sport on TV.
To obtain these figures, Arcom, the French audiovisual policeman, identified all the male, female and mixed sports competitions broadcast on television between 2018 and 2021. Over this entire period, marked by the crisis of Covid-19, the share of male sport is sixteen times higher than that of exclusively female sport, which concerns only 4.5% of total broadcasts of sports competitions. The remaining 24.1% are mixed events including the Olympic Games.
The overwhelming dominance of male sport
Women’s sport is becoming more and more popular on television, rising from 1,575 hours in 2018 to 2,350 hours in 2021, an increase of 50% compared to 22% growth for men’s sport. But this presence of women’s sport on the small screen does not influence the share it occupies in relation to male and mixed competitions.
Sports exclusively reserved for women increased from 3.6% of total sports competitions for the year 2018 to 6.4% in 2019, boosted by the broadcast of the Women’s Football World Cup in France broadcast on TF1. Arcom evokes a “break in positive trend”. This share then fell by half to 3.1% in 2020 and then rose slightly to 4.8% in 2021.
In four years, the place occupied by women’s sport in the living rooms of French men and women has only increased by 1.2%, a suspicion, always crushed by the male equivalent.
“The road that remains to be traveled”
“While this publication reports on the progress made in recent years, it also highlights the path that remains to be traveled”, pointed out Roch-Olivier Maistre, President of Arcom.
Among the female disciplines most present on the screen over the average of the four years observed, it is football which is the majority with 44% of the total of competitions reserved for women. Next come tennis (13%), rugby (16%), cycling (11%), handball (6%) and skiing (6%).
The Arcom report states that the presence of women’s sport on the screen depends on random factors such as the performance of French teams, athletes or players during competitions.
The free channels most fond of women’s sports
While the overwhelming majority of women’s competitions identified in the study are broadcast on pay channels (97%) which require a subscription, the share of women’s sport broadcast on free channels is greater and amounts to 9.1% against 4.1% for pay channels.
The study also mentions the fact that “a large number of friendly matches in men’s competitions are broadcast on the historic channels, while women’s friendly matches are rarer on these channels, finding themselves relegated to the free secondary channels of television groups “.
With this study, Arcom hopes to give a positive impetus to its “Women’s Sport always 2023” operation from January 30 to February 5. It aims to “encourage the media to broadcast more sports broadcasts on the antennas, but also to address themes related to the practice of women in sport”.