Researchers have claimed that greater than two-thirds of male soccer followers harbour hostile, sexist or misogynistic attitudes in direction of girls’s sport.
A research led by Durham College, primarily based on a survey of just about 2,000 male soccer supporters, detected what it phrases “overtly misogynistic masculinities”, no matter age.
Though progressive opinions amongst males had been strongly represented they weren’t as widespread as hostility and sexism and the researchers recommend this means a backlash in advances in gender equality.
The research was set within the context of elevated visibility of girls’s sport lately, most notably because the 2012 London Olympics and the 2015 Ladies’s World Cup in Canada, the place England secured a bronze medal.
Dr Stacey Pope, an affiliate professor from Durham College’s division of sport and train sciences, was the lead writer, together with her staff assisted by researchers from the Universities of Leicester and South Australia.
Their evaluation was primarily based on the responses of 1,950 male soccer supporters who frequently use UK-based fan message boards.
“That is the primary research to look at UK males soccer followers’ attitudes to girls’s sport in an period wherein girls’s sport has skilled a considerably elevated media profile,” mentioned Pope. “Our analysis confirmed that attitudes in direction of girls in sport are, to some extent, altering, with extra progressive attitudes. Nonetheless, the findings are additionally reflective of a patriarchal society wherein misogyny is rife. There have been quite a few examples of males from throughout all generations exhibiting extremely sexist and misogynistic attitudes.”
A sub-group of 507 respondents who answered specific questions had been divided into three classes: these displaying progressive views, others harbouring overtly misogynistic attitudes and covert misogynists.
The primary band of 24% expressed robust help for equal media protection of girls’s sport, with many saying the 2015 Ladies’s World Cup had represented a watershed.
But among the overt group – 68% of these polled – steered girls mustn’t take part in sport in any respect, or, in the event that they did, could be higher suited to extra “female” pursuits resembling athletics, moderately than soccer. Media reporting of girls’s sports activities – a sphere considered intrinsically inferior – was seen as “optimistic discrimination” or “PC nonsense”.
The 8% of followers branded covertly hostile comprised the smallest group. They usually expressed progressive attitudes in public earlier than revealing extra reactionary non-public opinions.
The co-author John Williams, from Leicester College, mentioned: “The rise in media protection of girls’s sport was overtly supported by some males. But it surely additionally clearly represents, for others, a visual menace.
“That is at a time when there are extra widespread anxieties circulating amongst males about the right way to set up and carry out satisfying masculine identities. For males like these, there was a pronounced anti-feminist backlash.”