ABOUT

"Raparigas da Bola" (English translation: Ball Girls) is an advocacy group that fights to give more visibility to women in sports. They wanted a campaign to raise awareness about the deep-rooted inequity that exists in sports coverage. STRATEGY: With the media spotlight on women on 8th march (International Women’s Day), then what better day than the 9th march to draw attention to the deep-rooted inequity that exists in sports coverage, everyday. A newspaper is made up of photos, articles, opinions, graphics, analysis, data, and other types of information, but in order to highlight the deep-rooted gender inequity that exists in sports coverage, we decided to use the only piece of data that really counts: the athletes’ gender. We used this data to distinctly illustrate the disproportionate exposure given to male athletes over their female counterparts by the 3 most important sports newspapers over the 365 days of the year, not counting International Women’s Day. IDEA: The news of 9th, published by the Portugal's top 3 sports newspapers, turned into 3 infographic publications, highlighting the imbalance of media exposure between men and women in sport. In order to get traction on social media, we partnered with 50 athletes who helped to amplify the campaign with their teammates and colleagues, spreading the campaign on social media with the hashtag #ElasTambémJogam (#WomenAlsoPlay). From just 30 copies of the newspapers, we were able to reach an audience 52x larger than Portugal’s biggest sports newspaper. CULTURAL BACKGROUND: Portugal is a small country with just 10 million inhabitants, and a country that lives by old values. Only ⅓ of Portugal’s professional athletes are women. Despite that, in the last European athletics championships, Portugal achieved its best result ever, winning 3 gold medals, ⅔ of which were won by female athletes. Portugal also has the world’s best female futsal goalkeeper, one of the best female futsal and hockey teams in Europe, and almost 0 media exposure.