The beauty of female athletes and the associated images of their bodies are often packaged for the consumption of their fans and audiences. Many researches have shown the fact that female athletes were “less visible” than the male counterparts (Duncan, 1990; Hargreaves, 1994; Duncan and Messner, 1998; Kane and Lensky, 1998; Lippe, 2001, 2002). The purpose of the study was to investigate how college students responded to and perceived the images of female athletes in Taiwan in a framework of female versus male athletes. Taiwan has become a “global” society, and yet the issue of gender in sports has not yet been well investigated. A mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) was designed in the study. Two hundred college students (77 females and 123 males) from one of the largest college institutes in Taiwan participated in the survey and one third of participants (30 females and 35 males) were targeted for the follow-up study. The methods of data collection included questionnaire, informal interviews and the participants' observational fieldnotes. Content analysis was adopted in the study. Qualitative techniques (constant comparison, analysis in terms of frequency counts and qualitative or nonfrequency analysis were used to determine emergent themes (Goetz & LeCompte, 1984; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Fraenkel and Wallen, 1996; Merriam, 1998), which produced comparative perspectives. Five major findings emerged in the study: 1) Taiwanese college students maintained certain stereotypes of “woman sports” and images of woman in sports. However, such conceptions constantly conflicted with their expectation of female athletes' performance in sports; they demanded the female athletes an equal “quality” or “standard” of performance to the male athletes. 2) Rather than sports performance, the beauty of female athletic bodies and their appearances were the primary focus in the participants' discourse. 3) Certain stereotypes of female athletes became observable: their characters seemed very vivacious and easy-going, and comparatively socialized than male athletes. 4) No significant difference was found between females and female athletes in terms of image, and neither was between female and male athletes in terms of professional performance. 5) The images of female athletes perceived by Taiwanese college students were apparently an adoption of those in media, which bore heavily the Western aesthetic and social values. And yet, other factors emerged and needed further consideration to reshape the images of female athletes in order to balance female athletes' gender positions in comparison with the male athletes.Keyword(s): college level issues, gender issues, sport topics