Based on a survey of 1,950 male football fans on UK football fan message boards, Dr Stacey Pope found openly misogynistic attitudes towards women’s sport.

Progressive attitudes amongst men were also strongly represented but were not as common as hostile and sexist attitudes.

Coverage of women’s sport

These findings are set against the backdrop of increased visibility of women’s sport in recent years. Although women’s sport still takes up less than 10 per cent of annual print and TV coverage, there has been a new age of media coverage in the UK.

Developments and major events include the success of GB women athletes at the 2012 London Olympic Games, the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup, launch of the professional FA Women’s Super League and Sport England’s This Girl Can campaign.

But the dominant misogynistic attitudes revealed in the survey may well represent a backlash against advances in gender equality.

Dr Pope is calling for more coverage of women’s sport to drive more gender equality and promote social justice.

Progressive and misogynistic attitudes

The fans could broadly be split into three groups who either showed progressive masculinities, overt misogynistic masculinities or covert misogynistic masculinities.

The men with progressive attitudes showed strong support for equality in media coverage of women’s sport with many saying that the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup had been a positive turning point in terms of representation of women’s sport.

The fans who held openly misogynistic attitudes towards women’s sport saw it as inferior to men’s sport, in particular in relation to football, with some suggesting women should not participate in sport at all, or if they did, it should be ‘feminine’ sports, such as athletics. There was also extreme hostility against increasing media coverage of women’s sport, which was seen as ‘positive discrimination’ or ‘PC nonsense’.

The final group of fans, who were in the minority, would express progressive attitudes in public but in more private moments reveal misogynistic views of women’s sport, adapting what they said depending on the social situation or who they were with.

If you would like to find out more, take a look at the research paper in Sociology.