Bar chart — Level of interest in sport, UK survey

The bar chart sets out how men and women in the UK responded when a survey asked them to rate their interest in sport on a four-point scale.

Overall, men were considerably more enthusiastic about sport than women. The most common answer among male respondents was the most positive one, whereas among women it was 'not very interested'.

At the top of the scale, 34% of men described themselves as very interested, more than twice the figure for women (14%). The gap was far narrower in the next category, where 33% of men and 29% of women said they were fairly interested. Taken together, therefore, about two-thirds of men (67%) expressed a positive interest in sport, compared with only 43% of women.

The pattern was reversed at the lower end of the scale. 'Not very interested' attracted the largest share of female respondents, at 35%, as against 21% of their male counterparts, a difference of 14 percentage points. Similarly, 22% of women reported having no interest in sport at all, almost double the 12% of men who gave this answer. As a result, a majority of women (57%) fell into the two negative categories, while only a third of men (33%) did so.