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The Media Is Being Sexist About Female Olympic Athletes & It’s Not Okay

Sammi Burke

The 2016 Summer Olympics began in Rio this past week, and despite the fact that it’s—again—2016, we still can’t escape extreme sexism in the media.   


During the games this Saturday, Katinka Hosszu, a swimmer from Hungary, broke the world record in the 400-meter individual medley. Yet somehow, this incredible feat was credited to her husband. What?!

Of course, we can’t have just one lapse in judgment on the media’s part. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune tweeted an article on Corey Cogdell-Unrein’s bronze medal win for the U.S. in women’s trap shooting.

Except that she wasn’t Corey Cogdell-Unrein, Olympic champion, in the tweet. She was “Wife of a Bears’ lineman.” While they didn’t try to attribute her win to her husband, they still couldn’t stand to have her be her own person independent of him. Is there some sort of expectation that a woman’s Olympic medal is not going to be enough to draw an audience to the article? They have to drop in the fact that it happens to be the wife of a Chicago Bear to make sure people are going to be interested?

According to the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune also felt it necessary to initially ensure that everyone reading about Cogdell-Unrein’s win knew that the Bears preseason is about to open, although that paragraph seems to have been removed since publication.

The internet wasn’t standing for any of it, though, and the tweets full of wonderful criticism rolled in.

Sammi is the Lifestyle Editor at HerCampus.com, assisting with content strategy across sections. She's been a member of Her Campus since her Social Media Manager and Senior Editor days at Her Campus at Siena, where she graduated with a degree in Biology of all things. She moonlights as an EMT, and in her free time, she can be found playing post-apocalyptic video games, organizing her unreasonably large lipstick collection, learning "All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor's Version) (From The Vault)" on her guitar, or planning her next trip to Broadway.