Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan: Give women's sports equal coverage

In the interest of full disclosure, let's get to it right off the bat: I'm on the Penn volleyball team.

I figure that's important to know -- because when I say that sports coverage in this newspaper is grossly biased in favor of male athletes, you may see a vested interest. Not so fast, though: I'm obviously a part of The Daily Pennsylvanian, too, and besides, you don't have to be involved in either to spot the unfairness on the sports page.

By now, we're all used to it: When you flip the DP over to the sports section every day, chances are overwhelming that you'll see a men's team getting top billing. Not just a nice article, oh no. We're talking color pictures, banner headlines, opinion columns and a news analysis for good measure. Chances are also overwhelming that you'll see a story about a women's team tucked into a corner if it makes the main page at all.

Some of Penn's men's teams are awesome -- this past year, we've had an Ivy championship football team and highly regarded wrestling and basketball teams -- so yes, they deserve attention. What adds insult to oversight is the fact that some of Penn's women's teams are championship, too (ahem), and their victories are routinely overshadowed by a men's loss. Case in point: After the opening Ivy basketball weekend, the men's team went 0 for 2, while the women notched two wins on their way to an undefeated first round. Guess who got the banner headline?

Still more maddening, it's not even always our own male athletes that hog the spotlight -- it's commonplace to see profiles of opponents snag the full-color picture and push Penn women's teams to the far-less-traveled inside pages. Apparently, the exploits of the, say, Columbia hotshots rate over our own athletes. C'mon, people, something's not right.

I know why the DP sports staff covers the Red and Blue this way, and it's not entirely their fault. They're simply reflecting a bias in society at large. Everybody knows, even if they won't admit it, that female athletes are undervalued -- most women don't even have an option to continue their athletic careers in any major way after they toss their graduation caps. And anyway, who would care if they did? Do you know anyone who actually follows the WNBA?

So, despite a few freakish incidents where Americans actually do pay attention to women's teams -- a winning soccer squad got a moment in the sun, gymnasts and ice skaters generate some buzz every four years -- men's teams get all the glory. And you can't untangle that from the fact that men's teams make all the money.

Ay, there's the rub. The national sports media can claim they're not sexist: We have to follow the money! The money sports are the ones people care about! We have to sell papers/get ratings/entice people to click on our links, dammit! What else can we do?

All right, the economics of this whole situation complicates things. I won't deny that it would take a major rearrangement of culture itself for the national sports media to change in any meaningful way. That's a problem for another day. But the DP is not the national sports media. It's our campus publication, and there's no reason why it can't do things the right way.

Yes, the right way. Because athletes are all athletes here and should be treated equally. It is simply wrong to say that a female athlete is worth less than a male athlete -- so why are they treated that way every day on the sports page?

Newspapers are powerful agents, probably more so than most people realize. Simply by choosing to cover one story over another, they are telling readers what is important and what isn't. To throw in every Communications professor's favorite phrase, newspapers play an "agenda-setting" role -- that is, they tell people not what to think, but what to think about.

So when the DP trumpets the wins, losses, hell, even the practices of the men's teams, it's sending a message: These are the players that count. And by neglecting to give enough credit to the women's teams, it's sending a message, too: These players aren't all that important. This would be OK if the messages were true. But they're not.

This goes hand in hand with the fact that women's teams are also woefully undersupported compared to the crowds the men's teams attract. One might argue that DP coverage is simply echoing the fan support, but turn that on its head -- what would happen if female athletes were treated with the respect they deserve on the pages of their own college newspaper? Fair, equal coverage to women's teams would be sending the best message of all.

And if they started with an in-depth look at the volleyball team, well, I won't be complaining.

Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan is a senior communications major from Wheaton, Ill. Six Feet One appears on Tuesdays.

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