Cheryl.Cooky

Who gets
to be seen
playing?

I'm Cheryl Cooky. My research sits at the intersection of sports, gender, and media. I am especially interested in how sports are a site for social change.

Portrait of Cheryl Cooky
Dr. Cheryl CookyPh.D. · Professor
Ph.D., Sociology — University of Southern CaliforniaEditor, Sociology of Sport JournalPast President, NASSS
35 Years of longitudinal
televised-sports data
9.2% Share of TV sports
airtime, women's sport
100+ News outlets citing
the study
3 Books on gender,
sport and media

Three questions I keep asking

Research

01 / COVERAGE

What does sports media count as news?

A longitudinal content analysis of televised news and highlight shows — the same networks, the same weeks, every five years — measuring how much airtime women's sport actually gets and how it is framed when it does.

02 / POLICY

Who does sport policy protect?

Title IX, eligibility rules, sex testing and trans inclusion: how governing bodies write gender into rulebooks, and whose participation gets treated as a problem to be solved.

03 / CULTURE

What do athletes mean to us?

The cultural work athletes are asked to do — as symbols of progress, as targets, as evidence in arguments they never volunteered for — and how feminist media theory helps read it.

Get in touch

Contact

Available for media interviews, keynotes, expert commentary and graduate advising.

Email

ccooky@purdue.edu

Speaking & interviews

Keynotes, panels, expert commentary and documentary interviews. Speaking · Media kit

Elsewhere

X — @ProfCooky LinkedIn Google Scholar ORCID