Anything Can Happen in Women's Tennis, Or Can It

Research Article Communication & Sport 1-19 ª The Author(s) 2019 Anything Can Happen Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions in Women’s Tennis, DOI: 10.1177/2167479519890571 or Can It? An Empirical journals.sagepub.com/home/com Investigation Into Bias in Sports Journalism Alice N. Tejkalova1 and Ladislav Kristoufek1 Abstract The claim that “anything is possible in women’s sports” frequently employed by both sports journalists and general audiences highlights the widespread perception of a seemingly uncontested truth about female athletes and their (in)ability to perform consistently at peak levels in comparison to male athletes. We focus on this treatment of female athletes in the world of women’s tennis and contest the “common sense” and “experience” justifications of the unpredictability in women’s sports with actual data to reveal clear media bias. Utilising a database of the Association of Tennis Professionals and Women’s Tennis Association tournaments dating back to the late 1960s and covering approximately 225,000 fully described matches, we examine the “anything can happen in women’s tennis” assumption through logistic regression, focusing on the effect of rank differential on the winning probability in the match while controlling for other factors (tournament type and stage, court surface, age differential, and elite players). The results are rather shocking. The women’s matches do not show higher instability or lower predictability at all, but rather the contrary—the men’s matches show lower dependence on the rank difference. The results are robust as checked for data sets of the year 2000 onwards and those including only special events such as Grand Slams. 1 Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Corresponding Authors: Alice N. Tejkalova and Ladislav Kristoufek, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Smetanovo nabrezi 6, Prague 1, 110 01, Czech Republic. Emails: [email protected]; [email protected] 2 Communication & Sport XX(X) Keywords tennis, gender bias, sports journalism, empirical analysis, logistic regression It is indecent that spectators should be exposed to the risk of seeing the body of a woman being smashed before their eyes. Besides, no matter how toughened a sports- woman may be, her organism is not cut out to sustain certain shocks. Her nerves rule her muscles, nature wanted it that way. de Coubertin in Fuller (2008, p. 5) The above view of the female athlete’s body as inherently offensive and biologically doomed by founder of the modern Olympic Games Baron Pierre de Coubertin may be more than 100 years old but still resonates in the minds of many sports journalists and experts. Even though women now participate in the vast majority of Olympic and other sports, and an abundance of analytic literature and recommendations how to treat women’s sports and female athletes exist, women’s athletic and competitive ability continues to be underestimated by both men and women alike. The assumption that gender overarchingly determines the degree of an athlete’s physical performance and psychological stability is still very much present. The pejorative phrase “anything is possible in women’s sports” and its variations, used by sports journalists as well as general audiences, reflects a widespread perception of a seemingly uncontested truth about female athletes and their (in)ability to perform consistently at peak levels in comparison to male athletes. This unequal treatment is often supported with appeals to “common sense” or references to past competitions of which the author or speaker has had personal experience, as Bruce (2012) describes: Sports journalists’ decisions appear to be based on historical precedent and tradition (thus privileging established male sports), anecdotal evidence and intuition (based on their experiences and ideological beliefs rather than critical public feedback or research) and their belief that a predominantly male audience is not interested in women’s sport for its own sake. (pp. 130–131) One such example of media bias against femaleathletesisfoundintheworldof women’s tennis where the “anything can happen” attitude has a particular traction. “The unpredictability of ladies with a racket is a well-known thing. Women have much bigger swings in their performance compared to men. It is not a reproach. It is simply the truth. It has been and it will always be,” states the author of “Pl´ıˇsková and her first title: her way again showed how ‘crazy’ women’s tennis is” ((mzk), 2019) on the Czech tennis player Karol´ına Pl´ıˇsková. A similar state- ment, “women’s tennis sometimes lacks logic,” is found in an article about another top Czech player, Petra Kvitová, in which the author asserts: Tejkalova and Kristoufek 3 The duel of Petra Kvitová and Julia Putinceva from Kazakhstan will be written in history as one of the most unbelievable duels and as the definition of women’s tennis. You can win any match but you can also lose it. (ram TN.cz, 2018) Such claims are certainly not local excesses connected only to Czech tennis, but they can be found in global outlets as well. The general view of women’s tennis as unstable is also expressed in social media discussions, for example, on Reddit in a post titled “Why is women’s tennis so unpredictable?”: I usually just watch Wimbledon and maybe 1 or 2 other events a year but find the men’s game really easy to follow because it’s pretty much the same guys on top but with women’s tennis I always feel lost like so much has changed in the last few months. (EdwardBigby, 2017) Similarly, individual evidence gathered for an opinion article describing the instability of women’s tennis results was published in The Economic Times (Kalra, 2018) or when Perrota (2017) argued for the Los Angeles Times why with Serena Williams pregnant and Maria Sharapova injured: “The scrappy group of women who remain is an enthralling reminder that sometimes, when everything seems to go wrong, the tennis season becomes wild unpredictable and oh-so-fun”. However, this approach is not new, as the years in which the quoted statements were published could suggest. Tandon (2010) discussed on ESPN.com “the WTA unpredictability” and related it to various factors, including inconsistency in performance and lack of the players’ resistance to stress. “Anything is possible in women’s tennis,” said the coach of the Czech women’s national team, Jan Kukal, before the match of his team with Italy in 2013 (Plaˇsil & Marek, 2013). In some cases, female players themselves adopt the “common shared knowledge” stance on the unpredictable nature of their sport and perpetuate the belief in their statements, like Karol´ına Pl´ıˇsková did in this case, “I know a lot of people who are more likely to watch women’s tennis because there can happen more surprises. Men’s matches are more stereotypical” (Nˇemy´, 2018). Anderson (2008) described it as the acceptance of hegemonic masculinity’s (Messner, 1988) perspective. As one of the most popular and most bet on sports around the world, tennis has especially detailed data available for essentially all matches played at the profes- sional level decades into the past. We thus aim to test the common sense and “experience” justifications for the claim that female tennis players are less predictable and less results-stable than their male counterparts. To do so, we utilise a large database going back to the late 1960s and listing approximately 225,000 matches together for Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and Women’s Tennis Asso- ciation (WTA) tournaments. We test the hypothesis of the “anything can happen” assumption utilising logistic regression focusing on the effect of the rank differential on the final outcome of the match. We show that no “anything can happen” effect in 4 Communication & Sport XX(X) women’s tennis exists compared to men’s tennis, but rather, to the exact contrary— the results of men’s tennis turn out to be less predictable than the women’s with respect to the rank differential of players. The same results are shown for both data sets starting from 2000 and 1968, as well as those of only special events such as Grand Slam tournaments or the Olympics. These empirically robust results thus cast important doubt on the accuracy of perceptions of the unpredictability of women’s tennis in comparison to the men’s game. Literature Review Women’s Sport in Mediasport Sports and mediasport (Wenner, 1998) are widely believed to be very gendered institutions and spaces where men’s hegemony and dominance have been reinforced by many strategies, for example, strengthening the position of male athletes or “normality” of men’s sport and the “otherness” of women’s sport, and marginalising the achievements of female athletes being among the most frequent ones (Anderson, 2008; Bernstein, 2002; Bissel, 2006; Messner, 1988; Vincent, 2004; Yip, 2018). We can find multiple content analyses focusing on the comparison of women’s and men’s sports coverage in all types of media, including the newest online media outlets, presenting very similar results: Women’s sports are underrepresented and at the same time the coverage of female athletes centres more often on the soft news features of their performance (e.g., clothes, visual impression, sexualization or infantilization of the athlete’s image as well as details about personal lives) over actual athletic competence (Bernstein, 2002; Domeneghetti, 2018; Kian, Bernstein, & McGuire, 2013; Kian, Fink, & Hardin, 2011; Konjer, Mutz, & Meier, 2019; Vincent, 2004; Vincent, Pedersen, Whisenant, & Massey, 2007). However, some authors have suggested the emergence of a new, “neutral” treatment of women’s sports by the media focused on plain information about events.

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