Still the Outsiders? Women in Sport Journalism

It has long been acknowledged that sport media is a male-dominated space, which has served to entrench women sport journalists’ position in the industry as outsiders. This research consisted of interviews with 10 women sport journalists working in the United Kingdom, exploring their workplace experiences. Drawing on Kanter’s theory of tokenism, findings indicate that women working in men’s sport face workplace practices that reinforce their outsider status. Participants discussed workplace harassment and gendered online abuse, numeric inequality, and the additional labor of fact checking and proving themselves to minimize their outsider status. In addition, this numeric inequality and outsider status leave women reluctant to raise issues, fearing career jeopardy, thus highlighting the precarious landscape that women face in the U.K. industry. However, there were suggestions that the increasing mediatization of women’s sport was indicative of newly emerging journalistic cultures that could lead to the greater acceptance of women in sport journalism.