About

#CoverTheAthlete is a social media campaign aimed at highlighting and combating apparent gender bias in interviews, commentaries and media coverage of female athletes in sports journalism. Originally launched in October 2015, the anti-sexist campaign saw a notable resurgence during the 2016 Summer Olympics in August 2016.

Origin

In October 2015, Canadian advertising executives and athletes Jessica Schnurr and Hannah Smit launched the official campaign website^[3] with the hashtag banner #CoverTheAthlete,^[6] which seeks to raise awareness about “sexist commentary, inappropriate interview questions and articles” focused solely on the physical appearance of female athletes. According to Schnurr, they decided to address the issue after watching a video clip of a post-game TV interview at the 2015 Australian Open tournament (shown below, left).

On October 28th, 2015, an audio-dubbed satire video featuring a montage of male athletes looking baffled by irrelevant questions about their private lives from mock sportscasters and interviews, juxtaposed with the interview of Eugenie Bouchard at the 2015 Australian Open in which the reporter asks Canadian tennis player Eugenie Bouchard to "give a twirl and talk about her outfit. Over the next year, the video gained over 1.68 million views and 760 comments (shown below, right).

Spread

On November 3rd, 2015, Redditor samuraislider submitted the #CoverTheAthlete video to the /r/videos^[2] subreddit, where it gathered upwards of 6,700 votes (56% upvoted) and 1,400 comments. In the comments section, many users argued about whether female athletes received more inappropriate questions than males.

2016 Summer Olympics

On August 14th, University of Denver law professor Nancy Leong tweeted a photograph of a headline in the The Eagle, a newspaper from Bryan-College Station, Texas, which placed a line about Michael Phelps' tie for the silver medal in the men's 100-meter in larger font above Katie Ledecky's world record for the womens' 800 freestyle. In the Twitter post, Leong captioned the image with "This headline is a metaphor for basically the entire world," alluding that the headline choice was an example of institutional sexism. Within five days, the tweet gathered upwards of 48,800 likes and 37,900 retweets.

In the coming days, the image was widely circulated on Twitter, with many using the hashtag #CoverTheAthlete.^[7][8] Meanwhile, others countered the claim that the headline was sexist, pointing out that Phelps was likely placed above Ledecky due to his high-profile celebrity status rather than his gender (shown below).^[9][10]

On August 17th, Mashable^[4] published an article titled "The Rio Olympics coverage is rife with sexism and here's what needs to change," followed by an article titled "The hashtag #CoverTheAthlete still very relevant in Rio, unfortunately" the next day.^[5]

Search Interest

External References