Aesthetics over athletics when it comes to women in sport

Men are two to three times more likely than women to be mentioned when it comes to discussing sport and sporting achievement, according to new research by language experts at Cambridge University Press. Women get far less airtime than men and their physical appearance and personal lives are frequently mentioned. Sarah Grieves The research draws on the Cambridge English Corpus and the Sports Corpus - multi-billion word databases of written and spoken English from a huge range of media sources - which also highlight a pronounced gender divide when it comes to the way sporting men and women are discussed. Academics found that in the Cambridge English Corpus 'men? or 'man' is referenced twice as much as 'woman' or 'women', but in the Sports Corpus (a sub-section of words in relation to sport) men are mentioned almost three times more often than women. Meanwhile, language around women in sport focuses disproportionately on the appearance, clothes and personal lives of women, highlighting a greater emphasis on aesthetics over athletics. While returning female athletes like Jessica Ennis-Hill look to defend their Olympic titles in Rio, more is being made in the media of recent births and marriages than their medal hopes in the 2016 Olympics. Notable word associations or combinations for women in sport (but not men) include 'aged', 'older', 'pregnant' and 'married' or 'unmarried'. The top word combinations for men in sport, by contrast, are more likely to be adjectives like 'fastest', 'strong', 'big', 'real' and 'great' - all words regularly heard to describe male Olympians such as Usain Bolt. When it comes to performance, it seems as though men also have the competitive edge: interrogation of the databases sees 'men?