Rugby Today Social Media Analysis | Tara Dunderdale

Tara Dunderdale is a semi-retired player and Collegiate coach. She emailed us during the height of the Rugby Today debacle and asked if she could post a guest blog about their social media coverage of women’s rugby. Read on for an in-depth and fascinating analysis:

If you are even tangentially affiliated with women’s rugby, I’m sure by now you have heard about the Rugby Today editor debacle, in which a player was told that women’s rugby is not now, and never will be worthy of equal or even proportional representation in their site’s reporting on the sport. The subsequent apology that wasn’t really an apology then doubled down, insisting that we misunderstood and, despite explicitly saying otherwise, Rugby Today is totally committed to the women’s game and what could possibly make us think otherwise.

This misstep came on the heels of a wave of criticism following last spring’s CRC, put on by Rugby Today’s parent company, United World Sports in which the women’s teams incurred significant expense (equal to the men’s teams) to participate but were entirely left out of the televised broadcast.  The outcry from women’s rugby supporters after being told we are “and always will be” less interesting than men’s rugby, also came right before the most elite women’s rugby teams in the US were descending on Glendale, CO for the WPL championships, playing for a huge audience streaming from around the world. Rugby Today’s editor and CRC are not alone in underestimating or undervaluing the women’s game, but they are a striking example of a systemic cultural problem around women’s sports in general. Thus, I embarked on some research to look for evidence of their claim that they are “committed to the women’s game” and perhaps better understand why they are convinced women’s rugby is so perpetually uninteresting.

In their insistence that they are committed to the women’s game, Rugby Today pointed to their sending staff to cover the Women’s World Cup in France last year, at great expense to their organization. However, it is not only every four years that work of covering a sport, any sport, is done.  Years of training and competitions went in to building the side we sent to compete internationally. While I recognize that covering the World Cup is important, the whole event made me curious the extent to which Rugby Today is engaging with the domestic  women’s rugby community on the small scale.  After all, they bill themselves as “… the leading online publication dedicated to covering American rugby news, highlights, scores, rankings, scores and schedules”.  Further, it is plausible that their claim that the women’s game is of less interest to their readers is based in internal analysis that shows more traffic on articles related to men’s activities.

For this exploratory research project I posed two questions:

1. Does Rugby Today utilize social media to engage with other users? If yes:
2. What users does Rugby Today mention in their social media outreach?

To answer these two questions, we turned to one of the quickest and simplest means of communicating and engaging with each other via social media, Twitter. We looked at @Rugby_Today, the twitter account of record for this online publication. Twitter, I recognize, is not publication, however it is a means for driving traffic to publications and a mechanism for engaging with the community they are purporting to report about, so it serves as a useful first step in understanding, in the most simple terms, who is Rugby Today making an active effort to reach via their social media. It also provides insight into answering the question of why they would see the women’s game as less relevant to their readership.

Methodology

In order to conduct this study, all tweets as of 6:00 pm EST on November 12, 2015 originating from the account @Rugby_Today (i.e. excluding retweets) were downloaded using NCapture for Nvivo. Each unique account was coded as a node and counted for the number of references in the full dataset of tweets.  Once auto-coded as nodes, each node (i.e. twitter handle) was hand coded by account type. Account type was determined by identifying the primary manager of the particular account using the twitter bio or linked websites. Each handle was coded for a single category (Men’s Team/Club, Women’s Team/Club, Joint Team/Club, Men’s Governance/Conference, Women’s Governance/Conference, Joint Governance/Conference, Individual Users, Media Outlets, Tournaments, Defunct, Other, and Self).  The full explanation of the method used to code twitter handles is included at the end of this piece, including explanation for some decisions regarding coding.

Summary Statistics

There were 3008 original tweets in the full data set, with 1122 that included at least 1 mention (37% of tweets).  From the first original tweet on the account to the time of the extraction, there were 1406 tweets for a rate of approximately 2.14 tweets per day and a rate of approximately .80 mentions per day. There were 541 unique handles included in those tweets that included at least one mention for 2608 total mentions for an average of about 4.8 mentions per account. In other words, slightly more than 1 in every 3 tweets included a mention of another account, slightly less than once a day they mention another account, and over time they, on average mention each account approximately 5 times.

The answer to the first question is, simply that yes, Rugby Today is using its twitter account to engage with other users.  But, the question remains, who are those users and does their engagement reflect the rugby community?

Well, the answer is resounding, and it is men’s rugby teams, by an enormous margin. So large a margin that any statistical analysis I had planned on doing was rendered entirely moot. What is included here are  are a few graphs that illustrate how Rugby Today is using this form of social media engagement and the vast inequity in direct outreach across the men’s and women’s game.  

Of the 541 unique Twitter handles mentioned by @Rugby_Today,  204 were men’s clubs or teams (37.7% of accounts). This includes teams at all levels, domestically and internationally. Individual users made up the next largest proportion with 138 handles (25.5%). While individual users were not coded for gender of the user, for obvious reasons, coders recognized anecdotally that a large number identified themselves as men’s team players, a potential variable for future analysis.  There have been just 10 women’s clubs mentioned using their clubs’ handles (1.8%). For comparison, there were 12 defunct or non-existent accounts included in the mentions. Women’s clubs literally came up less frequently than unused accounts and typos.

It is true that there are more Men’s teams than women’s teams in the US, so 1:1 representation may be unrealistic. To determine what proportional engagement might look like I turned to USA Rugby and calculated the total number of competitive college and senior sides are currently listed on their site. The chart below includes all competitive sides, which means some clubs may be represented multiple times. However, since multiple sides would mean multiple competitive games, it should still be reflective of the rough frequency of competition. The ratio of men’s competitive sides to women’s competitive sides in the US is approximately 1.75:1, while the rate of engagement on twitter with teams (domestically and internationally) from @Rugby_Today is 20:1.

Further, while it is true that there are 43 Joint clubs including men’s and women’s sides, even if we assume every mention for Joint Clubs was in reference to the women’s side, the rate of engagement is still 3.85:1.

This brings us to the next chart – frequency of engagement. While content of individual tweets was not coded for this analysis, one anecdotal review was conducted on a Joint account. The @glendaleraptors field multiple men’s and women’s sides but share a single club Twitter handle. Of the 36 times @Rugby_Today mentioned @glendaleraptors in their tweets only 1 was specifically about one of the women’s sides.  (As of this writing, @Rugby_Today has tweeted an article mentioning the Raptors recent win over the Berkeley All Blues, however neither team’s handle was tagged in the tweet.)

When we look at engagement, the chasm between men’s clubs and women’s clubs grows even wider. They have engaged through twitter with men’s clubs a total of 1068 times compared to just 19 for women’s teams, for a rate of approximately 56:1. Again, if we assume all references to Joint accounts were about women’s sides, the ratio is 3.45:1, but initial exploration indicates that is not the case. In other words, even giving them the most extreme benefit of the doubt, women are still meaningfully underrepresented in these engagements. Rugby Today has tweeted at women’s specific conferences or governing bodies just once, ever. For comparison, they have tweeted at their own handle more than that.

Looking at the full spread of the analysis, what becomes clear is that there are individual users (often, but not exclusively men’s players) who @Rugby_Today mentions by the user’s Twitter handle more frequently than the sum of all engagements with women’s teams.  In the graph below, each dot indicates a unique twitter account mentioned, at some point, by @Rugby_Today (tweets to their own account excluded from the graph). The size of the dot indicates the number of times they have mentioned that user, ranging from a minimum of 1 to a maximum of 148 times. (The user mentioned most frequently belonged to an individual user who works for Rugby Today).  

Rugby Today insists it is committed to the women’s game, but an exploration of their social media indicates that is simply not the case. Twitter is not, by any means, the only way to engage with or promote women’s rugby, and if their engagement with men’s teams was similarly sparse, this would be a non-issue. If it is true that their readers are less interested in the women’s game, it is possible that is because they make little to no effort to engage readers who are specifically interested in the women’s game. It is plausible by expanding outreach efforts to women’s teams and by extension women’s rugby fans, they could in fact expand their readership.

My initial hypothesis was that we would find slightly worse than proportional representation for women in Rugby Today’s twitter mentions, what we instead found was that they make mistakes more frequently than they attempt to reach out to the women’s community. It is difficult to determine the cause of this disparity, whether it is a purposeful omission on the part of the magazine or if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e. they don’t drive traffic to content about women, pieces covering the women’s game get less traffic, they assume this is because readers don’t care about women’s rugby, so they cover the game less, and so on in a repeating cycle). What is clear, however, is that, consciously or not, this media outlet is not, in any way demonstrating its purported commitment to covering or promoting women’s rugby in the US. While they make a consistent effort to reach out directly to the men’s teams about whom they report, an even remotely comparable effort is non-existent for the women. Yet, they, and their parent company do continue to seek profit from women’s teams via pay-for-play competition and ticket sales.  Rugby Today is not the cause of inequality in women’s rugby coverage, but they are in a position to do something about it, and I am hopeful that this research can contribute to positive change to that end.

Full methodology

The codes for accounts initially included:

• Men’s Team/Club (including senior, college, and high school)
• Women’s Team/Club (including senior, college, and high school)
• Joint Team/Club (clubs fielding both Men’s and Women’s sides and sharing a single twitter account)
• Rugby Governance or Competitive Conference (Men’s teams only)
• Rugby Governance or Competitive Conference (Women’s teams only)
• Rugby Governance or Competitive Conference (Joint-both Men’s and Women’s teams)
• Individual users
• Media Outlets
• Tournaments
• Other

Once coded, it was discovered that several accounts were defunct (e.g. have no tweets), suspended, or did not exist. A separate code was created for these handles from the “Other category”. It was also discovered that on two occasions @Rugby_Today included its own handle in a tweet, this was recoded as “Self”. Both new codes remained in the denominator for analysis. Individual users were not coded for gender because this, unlike teams or governing bodies, could not be accomplished systematically using twitter bios or websites. While some accounts indicated the owner was a men’s or women’s rugby player, the Individual users code was used to avoid misspecification. Joint club was used to define any team or club which fields both men’s and women’s sides at any level. Youth was excluded because it was not always clear if youth rugby offerings were gendered. If, for example, a club that primarily fields men’s sides also fields a high school girls side, and a separate account for the girls’ side could not be identified, this was coded as “Joint”. In some instances, clubs field both men’s and women’s sides but maintain separate twitter handles. These cases were coded separately as “Men’s” or “Women’s” as appropriate. For this analysis, content of tweets containing mentions was not coded, however future analysis may disaggregate joint accounts for clear references to a particular side.

Thank you to Lance Pruett, Samantha Vermillion and Julz Harvey for providing invaluable assistance with the data coding for this research project and editing of the final report.