Has the media been holding back gender equality ? – The media ecology and equality development

Welcome back to the next part of our series! In the last Blog we showed the timeline of gender equality in tennis, highlighting all the milestones that have got us to where we are. This Blog will look at what media ecology is and how it may have affected the big milestones. Have they been facilitated or impeded? Let’s find out!

Media ecology can be described as investigating how the media and everything it involves can affect our environment and the things we do (State, 2004). Developments in technology, culture and media agenda can all have an enormous impact on our world.

Media can be categorised into two separate sections through time (Jang & Park, 2016). ‘Old media’ has been used for hundreds of years, newspapers, radio and TV were the primary sources of information to the population. In this time, media agenda ruled all, those in control of this were large organisations and their opinions shaped the nation. In a time where men generally had the powerful jobs and influence, mens sports were publicised more, stunting the growth of women’s tennis. Therefore the old fashioned gender dynamic splashed out over the progression of tennis.

Further, it is said that media is a reflection of the current political and cultural status of the country (Holtz-Bacha & Stromback, 2012). Therefore, outdated views in the 1970’s on perceptions of women will have been mirrored in the media. For example, out dated perceptions of women can been seen in the 70’s and 80’s when media focused more on the looks of female players rather than their athletic ability (Bernstien, 2002), so they weren’t taken very seriously. What knock on effect did this have ?

A lower level of media coverage meant sponsorship deals were less frequent in the women’s game (McDaniel, 1999). This lack of money seriously impacted the development of women’s tennis. For years this was a domino effect under the influence of old media.

New media is not so much in the control of large organisations. Due to developments in platforms and technology, media is now more in the control of the individual and new media encourages more diverse and varied opinions. This has lead to the genders being much more equal in the media, which in turn has lead to significant developments for women, as the world started to focus on gender equality. The voices for women’s rights has grown louder and louder. The most recent rule change is women being allowed to wear dark colours at Wimbledon (Suchanek, 2024) where men can not, signalling the first time the dynamic has flipped. Is this fair? We will discuss in the next blog.

Thank you for reading. That rounds up the past and next week we will to debate if the media’s influence is still a positive in the present day.