על סדר היום: ספורט וספורט נשים בעיתוני הנשים פנימה ונשים (2012-2019): ‏ס‏פורט וספורט נשים בעיתוני הנשים "פנימה" ו"נשים" (2019-2010)

Sports were perceived for years, and perhaps since their inception, as bastions of masculinity, an arena where women were marginalized. Since it can be argued that sports largely reflect social reality even in the context of gender, and “agenda theory” can be used to explain the public agenda as a product of the media’s agenda, this article seeks, through this theory, to explain the extent of sports coverage in general and female sports, in particular, in the women’s newspapers Nashim (Women) and P’nima (Inside) between 2010 and 2019. Due to similarities that I found between theories dealing with women’s journalism and those dealing with sports journalism, I also sought to examine whether the women’s newspapers under review provide a mirror image of the negligible coverage of women’s sports in the traditional sports press. Despite my expectations from women’s newspapers, I found that women’s sports and sports in general appear in small and inconsistent amounts within both the fixed and changing agendas in the newspapers studied. When examining how the names and descriptions are listed in the tables of contents, as compared to those appearing in the sections themselves, I discovered that sometimes expressions from the world of sports appear in the name or description of the section title, but not in the actual sports coverage there—a phenomenon that also exists in the gap between verbal meaning and actual meaning in four additional units of analysis. As a result, readers might internalize that sports are not a female issue, and thus exclude themselves from the dominant discourse in society. Whereas in practice studies show significant women’s and men’s interest in women’s sports, coverage of female religious athletes in the general media, and an increase in the share of female athletes participating in popular and professional sports, the percentage of women athletes in competitive sports continues to remain low. I therefore believe that the presence of sports, including women’s sports, in the regular agenda of women’s newspapers could constitute another important layer in advancing the status of women in Israeli society in general, and of religious women in particular.