In search of post -Olympic 'gender equity': An examination of photographic images in 'Sports Illustrated for Kids

Children, especially young children with limited reading abilities are receptive to photographs and images, teacher's need to pay close attention to the gendered messages conveyed by a magazine designed especially for children, such as Sports Illustrated for Kids (SIK). This study builds on the work of Cuneen and Sidwell (1998) and Duncan and Sayaovong (1990), examining how males and females have been framed in the pages of SIK since the 1996 Olympic Games. America's female squads of the 1996 Olympic games were billed as "the games hottest acts" (Zaglin, 1996) and the games themselves were called "the Gender Equity Olympics" (McCallum & O'Brien, 1996). So, have the strides that women athletes reportedly took during the 1996 Olympic Games been reflected in the pages of this magazine aimed at highly impressionable readers? Six specific questions guided this investigation focusing on how gender was portrayed in the pages of SIK.;Method. Content analysis was the method chosen to help answer the research questions. Both advertisements and sports photographs in 36 issues of SIK were examined. Only advertisements and editorial content photographs featuring human models were studied. Items of analysis included the total number of advertisements and editorial content photographs featuring males and females, genders represented as prominent or supporting, dominance on the page, camera angle, active versus passive poses, type of sport depicted, and leadership positions were examined.;Simple descriptive statistics, crosstabs, and frequency distributions were used for determining the presence of an association between gender and the remaining variables. The statistical significance of the crosstabular analysis of the differences between male and female was ascertained using the Chi-Square test. The level of significance was set at p < 0.05.;Results. Female athletes have made small strides in the crossing over into a typically male domain in the past 3 years of SIK issues. Most of the findings from this study seem to indicate that female athletes are represented far less now and in inferior ways in SIK advertising and editorial images than a century ago. Sports Illustrated for Kids, for the most part, has continued to frame gender using stereotypical masculine and feminine ideologies, thus reinforcing old images instead of presenting new images of both females and males in sport.