The new "It's a skills-thing" Nike ad: Over at SI.com, Aditi thinks "it's absolutely brilliant."

Judge us on what we can do, the women say, not what we can do compared to men.

Female athletes are amazing and dynamic and enthralling all on their own. And there are more of them than ever before -- in 1971, one in 27 high school girls played on a sports team. Today, that number is one in two. Those girls aren't trying to be boys and they won't fail if they're not as strong as boys. They have their own plane to compete on, one that's not derivative and one that's definitely not lesser.

But Marie Hardin, over at her Sports, Media and Society blog is not so impressed.

Nike has just launched a new campaign aimed at selling women empowerment through athletic apparel. As the NYT points out, the campaign, designed after Nike interviewed 175 female athletes across the country, uses prominent athletes discussing their views on sexism and sports. Although provocative at the surface level, this campaign still ultimately relies on tired themes (witness the ad featuring Serena Williams, for instance) that won't move women's sports forward -- but it may sell more $9 Nike rubber bracelets.

While I'm not particularly inspired by the ad -- the "own plane" discussion has been articulated by the Women's Sports Foundation for years -- I did note with some irony Aditi commenting on the second-class citizenship offered women's sports:

In every aspect -- the selling, the pitching, the marketing -- women's sports have forever been girls playing a lesser version of men's games.

Um, Aditi -- what about media coverage? You're writing for a website that lists WNBA at the bottom of the NBA tag... and guess what happens when you click on the WNBA tab? All you get a list of game stories from Sports Network.

You take a (totally justified) swipe at ESPN (the women's basketball network!) for pre-empting the first 2 hours of the eventual triple-overtime game Fever-Sun game because of the Little League World Series, but you let Sports Illustrated off the hook?

Of course, as noted over at the WSF, neither ESPN nor SI are shining examples of egalitarian coverage. "A 2002 study found that Sports Illustrated," writes the WSF, "the world’s largest general-interest sport magazine, provided only 10% of its coverage to female athletes."

As female athletes continue to struggle to gain the notoriety and respect of today’s male athletes, researchers from Indiana University-Bloomington set out to study ESPN The Magazine, one of Sports Illustrated’s biggest competitors, to see if it, too, provided inadequate coverage of women’s sports.

Andrea N. Eagleman and Paul M. Pedersen found that the magazine provides only 3% of its written coverage and 5% of photographic coverage to female athletes. ESPN The Magazine provides significantly less coverage of female athletes than Sports Illustrated, therefore perpetuating the cycle of denying female athletes the same promotional benefits of their male counterparts.

You can check out an abstract of the recent study of ESPN The Magazine here (pdf alert).