In order to better comprehend what this means for women in sports, imagine that you were to pick randomly from all 25 magazines that featured women on the cover. And, out of the 13 that did, only 3 covers featured female athletes of color, which happens to be less than the number of times Kate Upton graced the cover (once in 2012, twice in 2013, and once in 2014)! 1 Amazingly, the counts illustrate that just 2.67% of all covers featured female athletes or coaches. Specifically, I counted the number of covers featuring male athletes/coaches (448), other males (4), female athletes/coaches (13), female swimsuit models (7), other miscellaneous women (5), and covers that are featuring no individual or group of individuals in particular (10–these mostly consists of covers that are just text or pictures of objects). In order to address this question, I collected data from the online SI Covers Archive for years 2010-2014–a five year time span that consists of 487 covers. It’s that time of year…the time of year when we are all reminded that the Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated exists, a fact that made John Oliver’s team recently ask, “do people not understand they can now just type ‘naked ladies’ into the internet and see what Google throws at them?” On top of being reminded of the Swimsuit Issue’s existence, I also recently became reminded of a question that has often popped into my head about Sports Illustrated: How many female athletes are on the cover of this magazine as compared to the number of swimsuit-clad models? Investigation The Distribution of 'Sports Illustrated' Covers The Bikini’d & The Not 4 Intro
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