Boys in the Booth: The Impact of Announcer Gender on Audience Demand

Abstract

This study provides an experiment to examine whether announcer gender impacts audience demand. With special attention to literature detailing the role of women in sports, sports economics, as well as uses and gratifications theory, this study provides an experiment wherein participants watched a sporting event announced by a man or a woman. Afterward, the participants responded to questions regarding their attitudes toward the sporting event they watched. Overall, the male announcer engendered greater feelings of enjoyment and lower feelings of cognitive load than the female announcer. Feelings of autonomy and hostile sexism also played a significant role in mediating the relationship between independent and dependent variables. This study is diagnostic such that it provides empirical evidence that women will have a more difficult time succeeding in this labor market. Also, this study provides noteworthy areas for content producers to focus on in order to increase demand for a product.

Auditory Cuteness in Sports Podcasting: A New Lookism?

“…This finding thus verifies the co-occurrence of systematic and heuristic processing modes in an interactive fashion—a core postulate of the heuristic-systematic model (Bohner et al, 1995). Since Rogers (2020) found that male audiences tend to perceive higher cognitive load and lower enjoyment when listening to female sportscasters, auditory cuteness presents a potential to improve male listeners’ acceptance of female professionals. However, as vocal qualities are less easily manageable than appearances, the preference for underage female voices may induce extra effort and constant self-surveillance from female sports podcasters.…”

“…Female sports announcers have been critiqued about their voice (Rogers, 2020), but work by Etling and colleagues (2011) found that listeners showed no preference for female sportscasters’ pitch, leading to the question of what female qualities are favored in sportscasting. As suggested by Etling et al (2011), in order to win over the audience, women should present their feminine vocal characteristics rather than “fit the traditionally low-pitched male announcer model” (p. 17).…”

The Use of Deep Learning and VR Technology in Film and Television Production From the Perspective of Audience Psychology

“…The audiences can experience the scenes and images in the movie through increasingly realistic virtual images. They can have a continuous sense of movement watching a single still image, which is also inseparable from audiences' psychological activities (Rogers, 2020 ). Except for the audiences' physiological “persistence of vision,” the motion on the screen is originated from the fabrication of the audiences' psychological activities.…”