Literature Review: March Madness Fiasco

    Sexism in sports has recently become more openly talked about in recent years. Before it was never a conversation that was “appropriate” because it makes others uncomfortable or because others disagreed with some of the arguments being made against sexism in sports. A large number of academic articles and research examines how sexism in sports has evolved into something that can be spoken about openly, and that is due to social media.

    Research into the importance of understanding sexism in sports has reached multiple categories including sexism in sports journalist, for example Jourdan Rodrigue’s interview of Cam Newton. Sexism inn sports has also been called out through social media campaigns, like Just Not Sport’s campaign of #MoreThanMean. And social media has since been identified as a way for women to finally speak out against the dichotomy of either pretty or powerful in sports.

    On March 18^th, 2021, Ali Kershner, the Stanford Sports Performance Coach posted a controversial image of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament vs. Women’s Basketball tournament bubble set up. The men received a fully equipped lifting facility for a mass number of people, whereas the women received a few floor mats and one set of dumbbells ranging from 5-25 pounds.

    In the past year of social reform and protest, this post draws importance to the idea of equality and justice that’s also voiced by Kershner, “In a year defined by a fight for equality this is a chance to have a conversation and get better.” Much of the previous articles covered information regarding reactions from the general public via social media but none include numerical data about what kind of reactions people where having and who was speaking up and using their voice, and that is what my research is interested in finding.

March Madness Fiasco: Initial Data

For my first day of data collecting, I looked at the first 30 original comments and looked specifically at what reactions both men and women had to the post. I found that most people were either angry, surprised, thankful or in the complete opposition of the post. I have organized this data in the graph below.

I wasn't surprised by the number of people who were angry, that was an obvious response, and it wasn't a surprise that more women commented than men, but I was surprised to see that the only people who were in the opposition were women! I wonder if this trend will continue or if there will be more men in the opposition as well. I also found it ironic that more men commented more posts of surprise, like they didn't realize it was this bad of an issue.

March Madness Fail: How Fans View the Weight Room Fiasco

Hey all! Its been a while, but with my semester coming to an end, were about to nose dive into a lot of blogs! To start, I wanted to give some background to what I'm going to be doing.  I am going to take a look at a post on social media and break it down based off a question I want to answer about it. 

Now that you have the broad idea, you may be wondering, "What post will she look at?", What question will she ask?", "how is she going to draw out data?", and if you weren't wondering that its no worries, I'm sure you've already stopped reading at this point 😉. 

To start, I wanted to look at the NCAA Women's March Madness Fiasco. If you haven't heard about it let me show you the original post by @kershner.ali on Instagram. 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CMkRJ2LswFp/

Above is an image of first the Men's weight room compared to the Women's weight room at the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament vs. Women’s Basketball tournament. Needless to say there are some HUGE differences!! I personally don't have any connection to basketball, but I have been a volleyball player since I was 6 years old, and this is definitely a slap to the face in terms of equal opportunity in sports.

So what question am I asking? I want to know if people feel like they can't voice their opinion on social media in fear of being "canceled" by Cancel Culture, specifically men. And, is there any evidence of that from this post?

Now to my methods. This post currently has 3,641 comments, so I want to sample at least 100 of them with a variety of comments from early, middle, and late comments. I want to see if the narrative changed as the original comments added up. 

In conclusion, I will be analyzing this trending social media post to see how fans reacted to the weight room discrepancies at the March Madness Tournaments through random selection of 100 comments from throughout the post in an effort to find any correlation between sex and number of comments.