March 25, 2022
Britain's governing body for tennis, the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), is challenging organisations including Google to end digital gender bias towards men after its recent research found female players significantly underrepresented in online search results about sport.
The study commissioned by LTA from Verkeer, a specialist Digital Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation agency, highlighted the extent to which male-focused content and information dominate search engine results for generic terms about tennis players. LTA noted that the results further perpetuate gender inequality within sports and contribute to the low rates of girls' and women’s participation.
‘Tennis’ is searched 74,800 times per month on average in the UK. Generic search queries for ‘best tennis players’, ‘best tennis players in the world’ or ‘who is the number one tennis player’ were shown to be heavily unbalanced in favour of men, despite the fact that 47% of tennis players are female and 53% are male.
98% of results are male when searching ‘best tennis players in the world’, 86% of video results for ‘best and top’ tennis players are male, only 15% of images ‘above the fold’ (positioned in the upper half on a web page or newspaper) are female, and 92% of recommended search queries are male.
Tennis has relatively been balanced, with mixed-gender matches having been placed at the sport’s major events for over 100 years and equal prize money increasingly obtainable. However, the Gender Equality in Search Report looked at over 8,000 keywords returned by over 150,000 URLs and found that online algorithms appear to be holding back the advancement of gender equality within the sport by only showing male tennis players in generic tennis searches.
LTA Chief Operating Officer, Julie Porter shared that there were more television viewers during the recent women’s finals at Grand Slams compared to the men’s finals, but these same rates of visibility aren’t reflected in what people search for online.
“It’s genuinely shocking to see how dominated these results are by male-specific information. ...if it’s like this for a leading women’s sport like tennis then it demonstrates just how important it is that this issue is addressed.”
The LTA has a goal for tennis to become a truly gender-balanced sport and has worked towards this by delivering gender-balanced coverage across its own channels and website. In a recent report by the Women’s Sport Trust, work done by the LTA sets a positive example of a sports governing body that has driven gender parity.
In response to this research, Google told the Telegraph that “addressing gender representation in Search is an important priority for us... Because our systems organize content from the web and common questions that people ask, results can sometimes mirror biases or stereotypes that exist on the web and in the real world.”