Talk:Wikinews interviews academic Steve Redhead about Australian women's soccer

Journalist notes
I sent off questions to about 15 different people, including 4 women's sport bloggers, 1 journal, 5 academics and people various soccer federations in Australia. I received one response. It has been sent to scoop. The background knowledge from the questions is based on my PhD work knowledge on Australia's sporting culture. I discussed some of these with pi zero on scoop when I was trying to write the questions as neutrally as possible. This includes the fact that Australia has historically used sports as a form of gender normalizing female behavior. For example, women in netball and field hockey wear skirts. At the same time, they were actively discouraged or barred from participating in other sports.

I researched other parts to confirm things I already suspected, including levels of media coverage. (The Australian government has written reports on this topic which has found that women's sports get much less coverage than men's, and they have tried to create legislative solutions to enhancing the levels of coverage for women, which has led to additional airtime for women on SBS and ABC.)  I did this on Newsbank Australia, with a search I did yesterday. The following results table gives a clue.

I know the A-League is not making money. I've read about this extensively in the past, and had conversations with sport professionals in Australia. This is widely acknowledged, and is why one W-League team folded. Soccer is the fourth most popular football code in Australia by spectatorship. The ANZ Championship, the national professional netball league, is profitable. It is one of the few profitable women's teams in the world.

[http://www.ausport.gov.au/supporting/funding/grants_and_scholarships/grant_funding_report?FundingCategory=&RecipientName=&RecipientType=Individual&RecipientState=&FinancialYear=2013&Submit=Filter DAS grants stand for direct athlete scholarships.] If you make enough money play sports, you don't generally need one. But just to be sure, I found a list of all the members of the Socceroos and Matildas, and I went through the men's team. None have scholarships. I got halfway through the women's team. The table below shows some of that.

[httP://www.fifa.com/worldranking/rankingtable/index.html I checked the FIFA rankings to verify them]. --LauraHale (talk) 14:36, 7 December 2013 (UTC)


 * COI type statement: I should probably put in a disclaimer that this story is a way of trying to socially responsibly deal with some discussions I was involved on Wikipedia in relation to where I have claimed the article is not neutral.  I consulted with Pi zero and another accredited report to try to make sure my questions were not incredibly leading and to try to make them more neutral. --LauraHale (talk) 15:21, 7 December 2013 (UTC)