I was perplexed to discover that not very many women follow sports-related Twitters according to Wendy Thurm’s article, Female Sportswriter Asks: ‘Why Are All My Twitter Followers Men? Actually, her findings show that only 11 percent of her own followers were women. Yes, 11 percent, what a coincidence. Her Twitter account isn’t just an anomaly in this either. Other female sportswriters Thurm contacted shared in similar statistics, with three other writers having 12 percent of their followers consisting of women.
Most of the Twitters I follow are sports-related, I mean, I think I follow almost every player on the NY Giants team, which is why I was pretty surprised to hear this. So to figure out why this could be, Thurm looked to female viewership of sports in general, saying,
“According to The Nielsen Company’s 2013 Sports Media Report, women made up only 35 percent of the TV audience for NFL games during the 2013 season, the highest figure among the four major American sports. The NHL was second, with 32 percent women TV viewers. The NBA and MLB lagged behind at 30 percent. NASCAR bested the NFL by drawing a TV audience that was 37 percent women.”
Those numbers seemed a lot more normal to me, so why don’t these Twitter accounts have female follower percentages in the 30% range? Or at least the 20% range? According to input Thurm received from Penn State professor Marie Hardin, women and men have differing expectations of how their leisure time should be spent. Men benefit socially from being sports fans, she says, while it would not be the cultural norm for women to put sports above their family and career. Therefore in their free time, they wouldn’t be perusing Twitter accounts devoted to sports.
Thurm sees this as a problem, as do I, because Twitter facilitates discussion about sports. So when women are not involved in that discussion, they’re not sharing their views on various sports topics and events. Thurm’s issue with this is,
“… If they’re not on Twitter in significant numbers, they’re not influencing where the story goes next on that medium either … And in the long run, that’s not good for women sports fans, women sports reporters, or for sports and our broader, more informed conversations about them.”
With Twitter becoming a more integral part of today’s media landscape, women need to be involved in the sports discussion through this outlet as well. General sports-related Twitter accounts such as Bleacher Report also only have 11 percent of female followers, showing that women aren’t prevalent enough in this medium and I know some of us have a lot to contribute to the online sports discussion.
The 11 Percent 