Gender Bias in Sports Reporting: Female Athletes in the British Press

This paper addresses the question of the representation of female athleticism in the British press. By means of a corpus-assisted analysis of sports reporting of two female athletes, the Russian tennis champion Maria Sharapova and the Italian swimming champion Federica Pellegrini, it offers a linguistic description of the stereotyped discourse reserved for women in sports settings. The study reveals the presence in the corpus of a discursive frame which tends to downplay the athletic ability and success of female athletes. This frame emerges from two basic discourse strategies, a thematic strategy, which eroticizes the body of the female athlete and a metaphorical strategy, which trivializes it. The study suggests that this type of representation is motivated by sexist stereotyping related to the ideological interests of male hegemony. [1].