Women sports journalists on Twitch during the men's football World Cup in Qatar

Abstract

The choice of Qatar, a country that does not respect women's human rights, as the host of the most recent men's football World Cup, put the spotlight on equality and the cultural impact of its social challenges, not only for women as spectators, but also for female sports journalists as creators of news content. The low participation rates of female journalists in sports coverage continues to reveal an alarming gender gap, including online. This study focuses on evaluating the news spaces on Twitch during the Qatar 2022 Football World Cup to determine whether this social network represents a space that encourages the presence of female sports journalists or whether it reproduces the same structure of inequality as traditional media. To address this objective, a quantitative and qualitative study was conducted to identify the presence of female sports journalists and their role during the World Cup coverage. The results show that, in the more than 292 hours analysed, men participated on 475 occasions and women on only 34, giving an average presence of one male sports journalist every 38 minutes compared to one female sports journalist every 9 hours. In addition, women assumed a secondary role, with contributions on banal topics, while men dominated the news space, leading all sports channels. In short, the underrepresentation of female sports journalists on new media broadcast channels such as Twitch reveals a situation in which female sports journalists continue to be unfairly absent from the front line of sports coverage.