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Since Title IX was enacted in 1972, women’s advocates have considered how the law has affected female participation in sports, and critics have suggested that the law has unfairly denied opportunities to men. Studies have examined how journalists have covered Title IX and its consequences, yet few have looked at how advocacy groups have sought to influence coverage of the law. This textual analysis examines press statements published by the Women’s Sports Foundation from 2004 through 2009 and concludes that the organization used frames of community and transcendence in discussing women’s athletic participation. The foundation characterized community as essential to the support of women’s participation in sports and suggested that participation and achievement in sports were symbolic of women’s accomplishments in the larger society. The foundation also focused on fairness and equality as rationales for equitable distribution of resources and opportunities. Title IX was rarely mentioned in press statements.

This study explored how student-athletes at UNC-Wilmington (UNCW) used Twitter to help save their swimming and diving teams from being eliminated. Both a series of interviews and a content analysis of 1,775 tweets by 25 athletes were conducted. The results suggest that athletes and advocates can use Twitter to raise awareness about their cause. The UNCW athletes’ goal to demonstrate community support by alerting as many people as possible through social media was achieved through tweeting consistently, becoming opinion leaders in the two-step flow of information, and using weak ties to get followers of other accounts to rally behind their cause. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.

This 2-part longitudinal study uses quantitative content analysis of newspapers to investigate gender dynamics in producing news on equality in sports. It analyzes differences in Title IX coverage by reporter gender to determine whether female journalists advocated more aggressively for women’s equality than their male counterparts did. The study’s first part uses content analysis of volume and placement of articles about Title IX, by journalist gender, and discusses the implications of how patterns of volume and placement have changed over time. The second part identifies advocacy and opposition frames used in the conflict over Title IX; applies content analysis of frames used, by journalist gender; and discusses implications of reporting differences and changes over time for equality. Evidence suggests that, first, social control; then a feminist perspective; and, most recently, a postfeminist worldview among female journalists influenced coverage of the law.

The emergence of social media has provided a space for discourse and activism about sports that traditional media outlets tend to ignore. Using a feminist theoretical lens, a textual analysis of selected blogs on the Women Talk Sports blog network was conducted to determine how fandom and advocacy for women’s sports were expressed in blog posts. The analysis indicated that bloggers enhance the visibility of women’s sports, but their engagement with social issues varies. Some bloggers may reproduce hegemonic norms around sports and gendered sporting bodies, while others may offer a more critical, decidedly feminist view and challenge dominant ideologies. While the blogosphere, and particularly networks such as Women Talk Sports, can serve as a venue for activism around women’s sports and the representation of athletic bodies, its potential to do so may be unmet without a more critical perspective by participants.