Where are all the women’s sports writers?
When 17.4 million people watched England beat Germany in the Women’s 2022 Football EURO’S final the moment seemed to encapsulate the growing enthusiasm and increased interest that women’s sport has enjoyed in recent years.
Improving audiences figures and the wider coverage of women’s sport has seen more roles for women in broadcasting but has not translated into column inches written by females’ sports journalists. Broadcasters Gabby Logan and Alex Scott have crossed the divide to becoming fixtures covering in men’s and women’s sport, creating the perception that sports journalism is much more open to women.
For the print media the paucity of women’s sport writers tells a different story and statistics produced by BCOMS (The Black Collective of Media in Sport) in its 2022 research on diversity make for depressing reading. Some of its more stark findings were that of the 78 roles in the written media covering the 2021 Men’s European Football Championship across eight national newspapers only three were women, and there were no female Heads of Sport or chief sportswriters.
So why is it that women’s representation in broadcasting is making strides but print is lagging behind?
Part of the problem is the structural barriers that exist within print media and the pathways into it for women. News organisations say they are free of gender bias (though UK Government data puts the gender pay gap in newspapers at 5-21%) yet they struggle to lose the boys club stigma.
They do not actively encourage women to put themselves forward for sports writing roles and more importantly they have too few to choose from and there are limited opportunities for women to get a full-time job. There seems to be no lack of young women interested in sport but a disconnect exists between leaving education and starting a career on a sports desk.
Former ESPN assistant editor Becky Thompson agrees, saying, ‘influencers need to find more ways to include full time jobs and different types of opportunities rather than relying on the system.’
Sports reporting is rarely discussed as an option for aspiring journalists, especially women. If the workplace culture is changing schools and universities need to catch up to encourage women to look at sports reporting as an option for a career.
There seems to be a connection between the traditional lack of coverage of women’s sport and its legacy of limiting the amount of women sports writers looking to enter a male dominate environment. The idea persists that women should cover women’s sport resulting in limited opportunities for them in the overwhelming male orientated print coverage.
Thompson describes her own experience ‘I find it quite difficult constantly generally being relied on, to be the person covering women’s sport or to be the person having to raise issues because there are one or two women in the office.’
Women should be encouraged to write about men’s sport but newsrooms and press boxes are still a predominately male domain and for women can make them feel marginalised.
Katie Shanahan, reporter for SKY, ITV and Amazon Prime remembers a match at Brentford FC.
‘I was the only women in the press box, there were 60 people there and I was the only woman.’
Although the industry has come a long way in its desire to be more inclusive, the sporting agenda in the newspapers is often editorially narrow and male-focussed and a certain amount of sexism exists, both consciously and unconsciously.
Katie stated; ‘It’s still heavily male dominated, but they are really nice and friendly, the majority of them. You do still get some nasty people that are sexist towards you.
‘It does still happen, it’s not nice and you do feel rotten for a couple of days. There is still a long way to go.’
The digital age has produced new demands that all journalists must now navigate. For women sports writer’s, social media offers the opportunity to reach readers in numbers that print can only dream of. They can foster their own readership without constricting editorship limiting the scope and range of their reporting.
However, this freedom comes with the potential downside of offensive criticism and vile sexual abuse aimed at women sports journalists from abusive readers.
Shanahan is concerned that online abuse deters women being sports journalists.
‘I am just worried that they get put off because you do have to have a thick skin on social media nowadays. It is massively male dominated.’
It’s not all bad news. Although there are too few role models in women sportswriters roles, there are some outstanding trailblazers that offer hope and inspiration to aspiring female sport journalists.
Anna Kessel is one such example. She is an award-winning journalist who in 2019 became editor of the first ever women’s sport department at the Telegraph newspaper. She has been awarded an MBE for services to women’s sport and is co-founder of Women in Football, an organisation battling and exposing sexism in the game.
It is vital that the sports media continues to evolve and a key element of that evolution is in ensuring women have more opportunities. The solution will be incremental and will be improved if the sports industry and the education system can co-ordinate to create clear pathways for women sports journalists to navigate to attain their dreams.
