Anything Can Happen in Women's Tennis, or Can It? An Empirical Investigation Into Bias in Sports Journalism
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11230%2F21%3A10401531" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11230/21:10401531 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=L.CNj6rMUJ" target="_blank" >https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=L.CNj6rMUJ</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2167479519890571" target="_blank" >10.1177/2167479519890571</a>
Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Anything Can Happen in Women's Tennis, or Can It? An Empirical Investigation Into Bias in Sports Journalism
Original language description
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.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
J<sub>imp</sub> - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
50802 - Media and socio-cultural communication
Result continuities
Project
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Continuities
I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace
Others
Publication year
2021
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Name of the periodical
Communication & Sport
ISSN
2167-4795
e-ISSN
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Volume of the periodical
9
Issue of the periodical within the volume
5
Country of publishing house
GB - UNITED KINGDOM
Number of pages
19
Pages from-to
742-760
UT code for WoS article
000499529100001
EID of the result in the Scopus database
2-s2.0-85075950138