2021.Dec.09

REPORTS

Report on the MeDi Workshop “Considering Olympic and Paralympic Games Coverage and Its Gender Representation”

On Saturday, August 28, 2021, Media and Diversity Forum (MeDi), the B’AI Global Forum-based industry-university cooperative research group, held a closed online workshop on the theme of “Considering Olympic and Paralympic Games Coverage and Its Gender Representation.”

 

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games set the promotion of gender equality as a key agenda to realize “Diversity and Harmony,” which is one of the three core concepts of the games. The Tokyo 2020 Games are indeed evaluated as being a step closer to gender equality in terms of formality, because they achieved having almost half of the athletes as women (40.5% in the Paralympics) and the number of mixed-gender competitions has doubled to 18 since the previous Rio 2016 Games as well as they were the first Games ever that transgender athletes participated in. On the other hand, how was the coverage of the Games? In this workshop, which was held during the Tokyo 2020 Games, practitioners working on gender issues in the field of media and researchers gathered to discuss the actual situation of gender representation by examining specific examples of media coverage of the Games, and exchanged opinions on how to realize better media coverage.

 

Various issues regarding the Olympics

 

The workshop consisted of three parts: (1) sharing the issues regarding the Olympics with the whole participants, (2) discussion in small groups, and (3) presentation of what was discussed in each group, according to the guide of the facilitator, Ms. Renge Jibu (MeDi member, journalist, and Associate Professor at the Institute for Liberal Arts, Tokyo Institute of Technology).

 

In the opening remarks, Professor Kaori Hayashi (MeDi chairperson, Professor at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies and currently Executive Vice President of the University of Tokyo, and Director of the B’AI Global Forum) pointed out that the Olympics has not only a bright side but also a dark side that it has grown on the back of all the negative aspects of the modern era such as imperialism, racism, nationalism, sexism, progressivism, and commercialism. She also mentioned that there are many overlaps between the Olympics and journalism, which is another product of modernity, and remarked on the significance of this workshop, emphasizing that thinking about the state of journalism through the “mirror” of the Olympics can be a way of rethinking modernity.

 

After then, in order to share the various issues related to the Olympics with all the participants, a researcher and a practitioner made presentations from their respective perspectives. First, from the researcher’s side, Professor Tohko Tanaka (MeDi member, Professor at the Faculty of Language and Literature, Otsuma Women’s University) explained what the Olympics are in the first place, going back to the starting point of the modern Olympics, and summarized the various problems in its development process into four themes: sexism, racism, nationalism, and commercialism.

 

The modern Olympic Games began at the end of the 19th century as a revival of the religious events held in ancient Greece, which was initiated by the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin who had the idea of “acquiring a superior human spirit through sport.” However, the “human beings” in this idea only referred to the white men, and Coubertin did not recognize the significance of women taking part in sport in the first place, said Professor Tanaka. Furthermore, the IOC prevented women’s participation in the first 30 years of the modern Olympic Games through clever schemes as well as expelled the athletes who expressed their support for the Civil Rights Movement from the Olympics in the 1960s. This means that the exclusion of sexual and racial minorities was carried out on a systematic level in the history of the Olympics. On the other hand, in terms of nationalism, Professor Tanaka pointed out that the ceremonies that people enjoy watching nowadays, such as the torch relay and the entrance of the Olympic flag, were actually created by Nazi Germany as a means of demonstrating and promoting the power of their country. She also explained how strongly the Olympics are linked to nationalism by citing that Professor Hayashi and her colleagues pointed out in their joint research that “the Olympics are not just a sports event, but rather an important item on national agendas, with a high news value,” and that the Olympics are only reported from the point of view of the achievements of the athletes from their own countries. Lastly, Prof. Tanaka criticized the commercialism of the Olympics referring to Professor Jules Boykoff’s theory of “celebration capitalism,” saying that while huge amounts of taxes are spent in the name of pleasure and enjoyment, the views of the citizens who pay those taxes are rarely reflected in the organization of the Games, which have become increasingly large and contribute only to the profits of private companies.

 

It was followed by the next presentation that Ms. Keiko Yamamoto (MeDi member, Senior Manager at News Division of Nagoya Station NHK) gave from the perspective of a news practitioner. Ms. Yamamoto began her presentation by mentioning the sexist remarks toward women made by Yoshiro Mori (then-president of the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) in February, saying that while the incident itself exposed the gap between Japan and global society in terms of the awareness of gender equality, it was also an opportunity for the Japanese media to become aware of the challenges they face in reporting. She pointed out, however, that there were still many structural problems in the actual field of news reporting, such as the gender imbalance in the people in charge of live coverage and, more seriously, in the decision-making layer. Also, she criticized the unconscious bias deeply rooted in the media by citing a result of the investigation conducted by Asahi Shimbun which proved that words were differently used depends on the sex of the athletes (it analyzed about 17,000 articles related to the Tokyo Olympics that were distributed on Yahoo News. Words such as “dynamic,” “intense,” and “perfect” were used respectively about 3.5, 2.1, and 1.9 times more often in articles about male athletes than about female athletes, while “cute” was used twice as often in female articles as in male articles. https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASP856K8DP83ULEI006.html )

 

These concerns were raised not only by the members of MeDi but also by the participants. Three participants who work for different media (TV, newspapers, and freelance journalist) made brief presentations as requested by the organizer of the workshop in advance. They pointed out that there was a lack of the awareness of gender equality within the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee, as was clearly exposed in the remarks made by former President Yoshiro Mori, and that there were cases that revealed a disparity in the amount of attention and coverage given to the men’s and women’s games. They also shared with all the participants what they found particularly difficult while working onsite: there is a tendency to focus on the side stories when reporting on young female athletes, and this tendency is even stronger under time pressure; even in the same company, there is a difference in the awareness of gender equality between the Social Affairs Department and the Sport Department; while there are many problems with the Olympics in terms of gender equality, it is also true that it has empowering aspects for women, so journalists need to think carefully about the contradiction as ones who are involved in the representation of sport.

 

Discussion in small groups

 

The plenary session was followed by more in-depth discussions in seven groups of four to five people, each containing at least one MeDi member, one B’AI member who is a researcher, and more than two media practitioners.

 

Participants brought the examples of articles or news programs from the Olympics coverage that they found particularly problematic in terms of gender representation, and discussed what was exactly problematic and what were the structural problems in the newsroom that led to such poor representation, referring to the materials of the IOC’s Portrayal Guidelines and Covering LGBTQ Athletes at the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics which had been distributed in advance, as well as the issues presented at the beginning of the workshop.

 

 

Presentations by each group

 

After 35 minutes of breakout session, there was time to share what had been discussed in each group with all the participants. Prior to the presentations, Ms. Jibu, the facilitator who looked around all the groups during the breakout session, commented that the participants discussed a wide range of topics in a very frank manner with taking advantage of the closed event.

 

The presentations from the seven groups can be briefly summarized as follows.

 

One of the most frequently raised gender representation issues was the tendency to describe female athletes in a way that focuses on their looks and the side stories such as marriage and child-rearing rather than on their abilities as athletes. One typical example is the use of the term “mom athlete” to describe female athletes who have children, highlighting their attributes as mothers. Although the term “mom athlete” itself was used less frequently at this year than in the past, participants pointed out that there are still a lot of articles written from the perspective that housework and childcare are women’s jobs, which show a fundamental improvement has not yet accomplished. The same goes for the portrayal of the appearance of female athletes. While it seems that there is a reduction in clearly biased expressions, these are merely replaced by “cute” or “fairy.” On the other hand, participants also shared their concerns about how to deal with the difficulties of expression in the case of reporting games like rhythmic gymnastics which are competitions that external attractiveness is important to some extent in the evaluation criteria.

 

What was impressed was that the discussion about the expression “mom athlete” did not simply end with the conclusion that the term is wrong and should not be used. Several groups expressed the opinion that it is also important to focus on how much the athletes who have given birth made efforts to return to where they had been in order to show how great athletes they are as well as to encourage women. As solutions to conduct balanced reporting, it was suggested that, for example, to address the struggle itself of female athletes when they are called “mom athletes,” or to increase the number of articles about male athletes’ efforts for childcare.

 

This discussion about the side stories and the terms limited to female athletes naturally led to the topic of online and social media, because even though typical gender-biased expressions have decreased in newspapers and television, they remain common in online media. Online media tend to use stereotypical headlines to grab the attention of audiences in short time in competition with a large number of other articles, and there were many examples of this especially in articles about LGBTQ+ athletes in this year. Given that the online media have become more important as news media in recent years, and that it has a greater impact on children due to its accessibility, the rules of expression on the internet need to be reviewed, said participants.

 

In addition, it was also discussed about television that even though gender balance is generally achieved in the scripts prepared in advance, unconscious bias can be easily exposed in the words that anchors, commentators or interviewees spontaneously speak on the spot, such as the case of a baseball analyst Isao Harimoto’s comment in reference to Sena Irie, who won the gold medal in the women’s featherweight boxing competition, saying in the live program that “there are women who like fistfight? What do the people get by watching it? A young lady before marriage is trading punches in the face,” and the case of Nagoya Mayor Takashi Kawamura who bit a medal which was won by Japanese women’s softball team when he was visited by a member of the team. The medal- biting incident caused even more of a stir when it was later revealed that he had made some sexist comments before and after the bite. Some participants expressed self-reflection as a practitioner about the lack of initial coverage of those comments and the fact that the problem was not promptly pointed out on the spot by the reporters who were on the scene.

 

The underlying problem in these examples of the inappropriate comments, as well as the gender-biased representations, is a lack of respect for female athletes in the first place. One participant said that the attitude of male directors towards female players and coaches in their 40s and 50s was discriminatory. On the other hand, it was also pointed out that there is a difference in the awareness of gender equality between the Social Affairs Department and the Sport Department, so while the articles from the former have improved, there are still some expressions of lack of respect for women in the articles from the latter. This implies, however, that the content of the news changes depending on who makes it, so can be improved by raising the awareness of each individual. This is why it is now necessary for media companies to provide adequate gender training, and for this to happen, it must be preceded by a fair evaluation of those who stress the importance of gender awareness raising.

 

This workshop, which was held in the midst of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, was meaningful in that it allowed participants to discuss frankly with the same concerns and bewildered feelings, and to build solidarity for making journalism better. In particular, it can be said that it was a good forum in terms of the formation of which is one of the missions of B’AI and MeDi, that brought together practitioners and researchers, who usually have few opportunities to exchange views, and helped them to deepen mutual critical mind through dialogues.