This new study is intended to measure what, if any, progress has been made in

the four years following the original report. Its findings are both encouraging and frustrating.

On the positive side, broadcasts of national events such as the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament and the U.S. Open Tennis Championship communicate a significantly higher level of respect for women and their accomplishments as athletes. The demeaning practice of referring to adults as "girls" has virtually ended. Announcers, in general, portray women athletes in more positive terms. Production values of women's sport events have improved. At the local level, the "humorous" sexual objectification of women has become less frequent.

Unfortunately, problems remain. The percentage of women's sports coverage on the 11:00 p.m. local sports news remains unchanged from 1989. Announcers c

The same broadcast featured a 2-minute, 19-second piece on a female "sky gymnast" or "aerial freestylist," who performed a variety of stunts after jumping from a plane. Athletes in this relatively unknown sport obviously possess superior athletic skills and courage, but the broadcasters (Lozano and Todd Donoho) undercut the woman's athleticism with sarcastic remarks.

The rest of the pregame show consisted of an interview with one of the coaches. Pregame discussion of strategies was hampered by the lack of an expert commentator. Whereas all of the men's games included at least one pregame expert commentator, such as Georgetown men's coach John Thompson, the first women's semifinal game had no expert commentator, though the subsequent two games did.

* Television networks should continue their movement toward equal quality of coverage of women's athletic events. The amount of resources and the production quality should be equivalent in the coverage of men's and women's sports.

We noted, in addition to the obvious quantitative underrepresentation of women's sports, three prevalent themes in terms of the quality of coverage of women's sports and women athletes: (a) lack of in-depth coverage of serious women's athletic events; (b) the silencing of women athletes' voices, due to lack of interviews with women athletes or coaches; and (c) less sexual objectification of non-athlete women than in the 1989 study.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 10251
Approximate Pages = 41 (250 words per page double spaced)