Mary Jo Kane, PhD, professor of Kinesiology and director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, and her research on “sex selling” women’s sport was referenced in a The Globe and Mail article, “Do female athletes have to wear miniskirts to be taken seriously?”
The author of the article, Katrina Onstad, writes, “Yet it turns out that sex isn’t necessarily smart sports marketing. Mary Jo Kane, a professor at the University of Minnesota, conducted a study in which male and female subjects were shown various images of women athletes – some of them at moments of great athletic triumph, some of them lounging and some in supine soft-porn positions. The ones that made the subjects most want to watch sports were the ones highlighting athletic prowess. The sexy images were deemed “hot” by some young male participants but provoked no interest in women’s sports.”