By Ashlee Sargeant on Thursday, 10 March, 2022 at 03:14 PM

The National Olympic Academy at the Barbados Olympic Association (BOA) hosted a virtual forum on Women’s Day to discuss gender portrayal in sport.

On March 8th, The Barbados Olympic Association Inc. (BOA) Women and Sport Commission hosted an event as part of its celebrations for International Women’s Day, under this year’s theme – ‘Break the bias’.

Women and Sport Committee Member, Ytannia Wiggins, made a call for more women sporting events to be given equal if not more media coverage. Wiggins added that more needed to be done to raise public awareness about the inequality of media coverage and the use of pageantry in gender-based sports in Barbados.

Sports Journalist, Ann-Maire Burke believed there was a disparity in how sporting events were covered. She remarked that printed media unlike video broadcasts were more prone to emphasize the looks of female athletes instead of their sporting prowess compared to their male counterparts.

“Print strives off sensationalism so therefore it is “cute” to see a female at a certain angle in print and sometimes the media can take that to another level for the sake of selling papers,” said Burke.

Another panelist, Anmar Goodridge Boyce, local sports journalist disagreed. He stated that the broadcast coverage usually had more liberty with the number of shots they can collect while at a sporting event, however it was the job of the journalist to ensure unbiased coverage.

“We as journalists and gatekeepers try to identify the photos that are not revealing and those that are, we do not publish them and refrain from putting them in the public domain,” said Goodridge

During the debate former Olympic sprinter, Obadele Thompson explained that despite the moral issues involved the business nature of the sporting world meant that companies needed to appeal to what the public wants.