Just 4%

40% of athletes are getting 4% of the coverage.

When Drive To Survive came out with its latest season, I mentioned that I wanted to apply the Bechdel test to the latest season in an attempt to understand how women in motorsports were being represented.

I realise that this was a little unconventional as DTS is somewhat of a documentary in that the content they capture is very much captured from real events, as such the representation of women captured on-screen was most likely a representation of the proportion of women actually hired by F1, the FIA and the teams.

With that said, I do believe that if you have a diverse team producing, shooting and editing that diversity on the team should make its way into the final edit - unless there is truly no diversity in the sport.

So I watched the entire season and here is what I found. Actually, I watched the first episode without timing the amount of speaking airtime women were getting. And I was left feeling optimistic and felt like women were present.

However, that initial feeling was absolutely not backed by the data. Whilst it felt like women were present and represented they were actually on screen for just a fraction of a second here and there and barely ever speaking. In reality, during that first episode, which was a total of 38 minutes, women were on screen for 1.8min, talking on screen for 49secs and if you take away Jennie Gow’s direct-to-camera air time, we are left with 28secs, out of 38 minutes. (LINK to the full breakdown of my findings)

It doesn’t get better as the episodes go by and every episode follows more or less the same pattern. There were no real instances where two women were in dialogue with each other talking about something other than a man. Again, I know I’m pushing things as the main protagonists in F1 right now are 20 men. But there were actually some real dialogue moments where two women were in a dialogue, but it wasn’t captured as if to signal that their voice and conversations aren’t deemed interesting or relevant.

The entire season was a total of 6 hours, and during those 6 hours, we had 15 minutes of airtime by women which is 4.1%.

And here is where it gets interesting: according to a survey done by UNESCO, although women make up 40% of all athletes in sports, they somehow only received 4% of media coverage. And in 2021, a new USC/Purdue University study found that 95% of all sports television coverage focused on men’s sports in 2019.

This coverage is absolutely crucial to an athlete’s career - without airtime, you don’t have visibility, without visibility you don’t have fans, and without fans, you struggle to get the sponsorship deals you need to stay in the sport. This leads to all programmes geared towards girls and women being underpromoted and underfunded.  And although things have gotten better for women in sports (marginally), one recurring problem female athletes face is that of ‘gender bland sexism’.

I was disappointed that women got so little coverage in the latest season of DTS, but more frustrating is how consistent and dominant this trend is to give less than 5% coverage and airtime to cover 40% of the world’s athletes.

Update: Emily Leibert wrote an incredible piece about S05 of DTS, and was kind enough to mention the Bechdel test I had attempted for S04. This piece is well worth reading as it touches on so many important aspects of the sport.