Are women still the ‘other sex’: gender and sport in the Polish mass media

Gender, Media, and Mixed Martial Arts in Poland

“…Furthermore, as has been argued previously by Jakubowska (2015), discussions around this form of gender inequality within sport media are largely absent from public discourse. Compounding this, the cultural significance of such processes have received scant interest from scholars or activists working within Poland (Jakubowska, 2014(Jakubowska, , 2015 -an imbalance which this paper seeks to help redress.…”

“…Compounding this, the cultural significance of such processes have received scant interest from scholars or activists working within Poland (Jakubowska, 2014(Jakubowska, , 2015 -an imbalance which this paper seeks to help redress. As noted above, the emergence of a female world champion in a highly masculinized combat sport provides an excellent opportunity for this undertaking.…”

“…However, what is clearer is the unequal treatment of sportswomen in the Polish media. Mirroring circumstances faced by many sportswomen in the West, Polish women's sport receives far less coverage than does men's, and highly gendered, overtly sexist and variously trivializing forms of reporting can be observed within much of the coverage which does exist (Jakubowska, 2013(Jakubowska, , 2015Kluczyńska, 2011;Kramarczyk et al, 2013). With respect to combat sport athletes specifically, online sports and MMA reporting websites (often the only spaces wherein female fighters receive coverage) infrequently run articles discussing the most "sexy women in MMA", framing athletes as both "beautiful and dangerous" 4 , highlighting that female fighters' fame -as in some other contexts -tends to rest primarily on how well they embody conventional, heterosexual femininity, rather than their athletic abilities or accomplishments.…”

“…With a somewhat untold 'herstory' of participation (Jakubowska, 2014), and a disproportionate relationship between levels of competitive performance and media visibility (Jakubowska, 2015), Polish women practice and compete in many sports despite prevailing gender norms which dissuade them from doing so, and see them ignored by the media when they do. With respect to such constructions of gender, it is perhaps unsurprising that Polish women are over-represented in sports and related activities which fit stereotypical ideals of femininity.…”

“…Within this paper, we partially address this imbalance by examining the ways in which Jędrzejczyk was represented in a variety of Polish media sources immediately following her two championship fight performances of early 2015. As such, we detail salient thematic elements from this reportage as a means of highlighting the ways in which certain media discuss women in combat sport, while also adding to previous research which has focused on gender and sport in Poland (Jakubowska, 2014) and specifically on gender in media sport coverage (Jakubowska, 2015;Kluczyńska, 2011;Kramarczyk et. al., 2013).…”