Cheryl Cooky, Ph.D., is a professor and sociologist whose research examines gender, media and sport. She co-directs the longest-running study of women's sports coverage on television, now in its fourth decade, and is the author of three books.

Cheryl Cooky, Ph.D., is a professor and sociologist of sport whose research examines how sports shape and reflect ideas about gender. She is a co-author of the longest-running longitudinal study of televised sports news coverage, which has tracked how much airtime women's sports receive every five years since 1989. Her books include Fair and Foul (Bloomsbury, 2025), Serving Equality (Peter Lang, 2022) and No Slam Dunk (Rutgers, 2018). She has served as Editor of the Sociology of Sport Journal and as President of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, and her work has been cited in over 200 news outlets worldwide.

Cheryl Cooky, Ph.D., is a professor and sociologist whose research sits at the intersection of sports, gender and media, with a particular focus on how sport operates as a site of social change.

She is a co-author of the longest-running longitudinal study of gender in televised sports news. Since 1989, the study has sampled the same weeks of coverage every five years, producing the most widely cited evidence of how little airtime women's sports receive — and how slowly that has changed. The work has been published in Communication & Sport and Gender & Society, and is regularly cited by journalists, broadcasters and sport governing bodies.

Her wider research examines the barriers to gender equity in sport, the framing of sports controversies including sex-testing policy and racialized sexism, and the role of feminist perspectives in shaping public conversation about women athletes.

She is the author or co-author of three books: Fair and Foul: Beyond the Myths and Paradoxes of Sport (Bloomsbury, 2025, with D. Stanley Eitzen), Serving Equality: Feminism, Media, and Women's Sports (Peter Lang, 2022, with Dunja Antunovic) and No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport and the Unevenness of Social Change (Rutgers University Press, 2018, with Michael A. Messner).

She has served as Editor of the Sociology of Sport Journal and as President of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, which recognized her with its Service Excellence Award in 2023 and named her to the inaugural class of Research Fellows in 2017. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Southern California.