Sports newspapers turned into a graphic that shows the media exposure gap between men and women

It’s commonplace to see an increase in news coverage about women on International Women’s Day; however, usually by the following day things have gone back to how they were before: male dominated news coverage. And it’s this inequality that Havas Lisbon and a group called Raparigas da Bola (English translation: Ball Girls) want to put an end to.  In order to highlight the inequality of exposure given by the top 3, tier-one, sports newspapers to female athletes, they came up with an action launched one day after International Women’s Day. The initiative, #WomenAlsoPlay, involves reproducing an exact representation of each of the 3 newspapers on 9th march as two-tone infographics, highlighting the inequality of coverage by colour coding every column based on gender coverage: one colour for men and one for women, to illustrate just how biased media coverage is towards male athletes. Early on the morning of 9th, the newspapers, fresh off the press, were digitalized, every column inch color-coded by gender, printed and then delivered to journalists, influencers, and athletes so they were able to share it with their fans and followers. All the newspapers’ logos were covered with a sticker using the campaign’s hashtag: #WomenAlsoPlay. The sticker also mentions Raparigas da Bola’s key message: don’t leave women athletes on the sidelines.