Cheryl Cooky
- Professor // Sociology
Research Focus
Communication and Media; Sex and Gender; Sport
Curriculum vitae
Office and Contact
Room: BRNG
Email: ccooky@purdue.edu
Ph.D. Sociology, University of Southern California (2006)
M.A. Sociology, University of Southern California (2004)
M.S. Sports Studies, Miami University, Oxford OH (1998)
B.S. Kinesiology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1995)
Specialization
Gender Equality; Media and Culture; Qualitative Methodologies; Sport and Society
CHERYL COOKY is a sport 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. She has appeared on MSNBC, National Public Radio, PBS Newshour, and Edge of Sports, among others, and has published opinion pieces for The Conversation, NBC Think epsnW, Huff Post, and the Indianapolis Star.
Her wider research examines the barriers to gender equity in sport, the framing of sports controversies including eligibility 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). Her research has been published in a diverse array of journals including, American Journal of Bioethics, Big Data & Society, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Sex Research, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, New Media & Society Qualitative Research, Sex Roles, Sociology of Sport Journal.
She has served as Editor of the Sociology of Sport Journal (2020-2026) and as President of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (2015-2017), which recognized her with its Service Excellence Award in 2023 and named her to the inaugural class of Research Fellows in 2017.