Week 6: Females in Sports Journalism, Hardin & Shain

Prior to diving into the topic of women in sports journalism, it is clear as an outside observer and consumer of sports that it is a male-dominated field. Major sports coverage – with the only possible exception being women’s college basketball – covers male athletes with the coverage and reporting done by male reporters, broadcasters, and writers. As any sports reader or viewer might be able to tell you, this is very evident; however, Marie Hardin and Stacie Shain decide to tackle the topic of females in sports journalism head on.

In the reading, Hardin and Shain discuss the lack of women in sports journalism. To begin, they pull out the hard facts. There are very little women in sports journalism; in fact, only 13 percent of employees in sports departments are women (Hardin &Shain, 2005). This number is then contrasted by the percentage of women in journalism overall (38 percent), showing the large disparity between the women in journalism and the number of women in sports journalism.

In order to better understand these numbers, the reading then moves on to describe some of the why. During these discussions, Hardin and Shain come up with a few possible reasons: sexual harassment in the workplace, lack of career advancement opportunities, overall discrimination toward women in the sports department, etc. Hardin and Shain then decide to expand on some of these factors in the form of an open-ended survey of a number of women in sports journalism. Included in the questions are: how they characterize their career choice, how they characterize their job satisfaction, and how they characterize the factors that impact tenure/promotion and how they see a possible resolution of the factors (Hardin & Shain, 2005).

Within their responses, these women in sports journalism demonstrated just some of the issues facing women in sports journalism today. Although women do the job for the same reasons as men – presumably for the love of sports and journalism – they are sometimes looked down upon for their career choice. Along with this, the lack of women in sports journalism leads to a weak support system for other women attempting to enter the field. Additionally, women acknowledged their negative treatment in the field, being discriminated against by sources and even readers. Despite the negative treatment, they still felt positively about their career choice. Lastly, women also acknowledged the lack of women in higher positions in sports journalism. Because of several factors – caring for families, sports departments “meeting their quotas” for women in the newsroom, etc. – women are not given the same opportunity to advance in their careers.

In all, this article pointed out a lot of difficult factors women must face in the field of sports journalism. However, they are not limited to these factors solely when they enter the field. They face these factors even before entering sports journalism, as many women struggle to find a spot in the “boy’s club” of sports journalism. As Hardin and Shain point out, sports journalism needs to address not only how women are treated once they enter the field of sports journalism, but the lack of women in the newsroom must be improved upon.