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.

The idea was based on using 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.

´Raparigas da Bola` (English translation: Ball Girls) is an advocacy group that fights to give more visibility to women in sports.

When it comes to sports media coverage, the difference between the coverage that male athletes get and females athletes receive is even more blatant. In Portugal, this gap is even wider.

There are 3 important sport newspapers in Portugal, with huge audiences that predominantly focus on male athletes.

Raparigas da Bola wanted a campaign to raise awareness about the deep-rooted inequity that exists in sports coverage.

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.

We needed a simple, powerfull, and eye-catching execution to turn the news of the day into a tool with which to fight for fairer visibility for female athletes.

That's why we turned the news of 9th, published by the Portugal's top 3 sports newspapers, into 3 infographic publications, highlighting the imbalance of media exposure between men and women in sport.

Simplicity was key to this project: a simple, two-tone, color coding system was used, whereby every column inch of 3 important sports newspapers was digitised and block-coloured based on gender coverage, in order to explicitly highlight the disproportionate media coverage given to male athletes, and in turn, creating infographics that could be used as a tool with which people could fight for fairer visibility for women in sports by just sharing the campaign and joining the movement #WomenAlsoPlay (#ElasTambémJogam).

All the content from Portugal’s 3 most important sports newspapers was condensed into the only data necessary to underscore this inequity: the athletes' gender.

On the morning of the 9th, the newspapers were digitized, then their data was turned into simple shapes like squares and rectangles, allowing readers to quickly and visually identify the difference in coverage given to male and female athletes.

Some say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this campaign, one infographic really was worth a thousand words. We focused on one single item of data (the athlete’s gender) and turned three newspapers into 3 iconic infographics, essentially summarizing data over 94 pages into 2 block items: male-athlete coverage and female-athlete coverage.

By turning our attention to Portugal’s top 3, tier-one, sports newspapers, and summarizing the information in them into gender-based data, we distinctly highlighted the blatant, disproportionate coverage of male athletes, and furthered the movement to break this cycle, and give more coverage to women athletes.

The combination of data, design, and courage, resulted in a tool with which people were able to use to fight for fairer visibility for female athletes.

With zero investment, including in media, but with a powerful execution, the campaign was able to:

. reach 52x more people than Portugal’s biggest sports newspaper;

. secure participation from more than 150 athletes to help spread the campaign;

. impact more than 32 countries;

. get traction on major news platforms around the globe;

. become the topic of the day on 9th March

. put pressure on sports newspapers to increase coverage of female athletes, reaching around a 100% increase in said coverage just one week after the campaign was run.

As a direct result of the campaign, one of the members of Raparigas da Bola was invited to write about gender equality in Portugal’s biggest sports newspaper.

They also increased the number of followers 5 fold, which led to more sponsors, allowing them to keep up their good work.