?Frankie may English1A Jeremy, Somer April, 9, 2013 Media Coverage of Gender and Woman in Sports Television fails to cover the stories of female athletes and this tells us the status of women in society. Women’s sports are the source of ongoing gender conflicts in society. Only a handful of colleges are up to par when it comes to supporting gender equality in sports even men typically own women’s athletic departments and national sports organizations. Women struggle with their image in sports, and must work to try and keep up with how being a woman affects athletes throughout their personal lives. This struggle can lead them to weight loss, depression, and feeling persecuted by the media. The media is guilty of labeling women and comparing them to others from sports to fashion, etc. Gender is the most basic form of human identity. Gender fundamentals define who we are, just as age and, race defines us. Sex explains biological makeup, denotes behavior, and categorizes us as being male or female. Gender, creates learned social roles and defines whether we live as a man or a woman; these roles taught in social institutions like the media, community, school, and family. As a writer for the New York Herald tribune in 1924 and 1925, Margaret Gross, was the first female to cover women in sports. She was also the first to appear in a sports column “Woman in Sports.” At that time, society had not embraced the idea of women’s sports. When Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) launched in 1997, women targeted as the primary audience of the league. Sheryl Swoopes is an ex woman’s basketball player, has been on the cover of sports magazines for women, and found sponsors companies for female players in the WNBA. Everyday women are lured into to watching the women’s basketball league, but attendance was sluggish, and decreased even more been falling back in the 2007 and 2008 seasons. If more women had watched females competing in sports on television, perhaps it could have encouraged television producers to on show more female sports (“Mowins, n.d.”). Women who have played sports is more likely to show an interest in watching female sports on television and participating more (Dahlberg, 2009; Tierney, 2005). According to Suggs, (2005) women joining sports teams have increased in the last 35 years. However, women have not become dedicated fans of sports as much as promoters and producers would have expected. An article, in the New York Times announced, “The WNBA d does not have a lot of women watching their program on television, which is causing the league to struggle” (Tierney, 2005, Para. 4). Many young men participate in sports and become lifelong fans of watching these same men’s sports on television Young women have increasingly participated in sports in the last ten to thirty decades years, but have not become devout spectators of wom