Down to the Nitty Gritty

This is a brief version of my later long and extensive research report I have to write on the DA, this one just includes a few epiphanies. Hence why it’s the Nitty Gritty.

Doing more extensive research I realised that to study people and their reactions Reddit is a great place for it, all people do is make threads and subthreads.  Below is a thread that I found when I typed in Natalie Pinkham. Now before I even get into why Reddit works well for my DA, you can clearly see how it has automatically proven that females in the sporting world aren’t taken as seriously. The first three posts are sexist comments made by people called “Ukbabes’ and “Hot reporters”. Interestingly enough, when I clicked on “Hot reporters” their profile was just females.

The epiphany of Reddit is one that I get into later in my podcast which is attached below!

Another epiphany I had whilst conducting this research was: females don’t tend to write articles, they are the anchors and on-screen presenters. Creating this theory that women in media are all based around this idea of a ‘visual medium’ and appealing to the predominantly male audience.

Recently I watched a movie based on a true story about Fox news that went into this theory a bit more. The movie is called Bombshell and is set in 2016-20. It focuses deeply on how women were treated by men in the media environment. It wasn’t specifically on women in sports media, but it still sold the idea of, ‘sex sells’. In an article on Professional Identity, it was said that “women sports journalists… Still find themselves locked into limiting roles ‘for the sake of that body’.” (Hardin. M, Shain. S 2006)

Using the framework of Liberal Feminism (Baehr, A.R., 2007) the study of women in the sports media workplace demonstrates a backwards idea of hegemony. Men in the newsroom will always be at the top with limited room for women to gain any roles higher than entry level. (Hardin. M, Shain. S 2006) “Participants said that systematic discrimination in ways that limited their promotions was a source of frustrations.. Saw gender as giving them a token status.” (Hardin, M & Shain, S 2005)

So here comes the next epiphany: women only write about other women.

In my own observations, I found that most articles women wrote were about female sports, which led me to suspect that women were only ‘allowed’ to write about women. “… Several (women) talked about the danger of being pigeonholed into covering women’s sports… Many of them worried that covering women’s sports would stall their careers.”  (Hardin. M, Shain. S 2006) But another career-stalling move was having a family. I began to notice a large portion of women journalists talking about ‘the balance between family and work’ yet, the lack of male journalists getting asked about this. An example is Natalie Pinkham, when searched in google articles that come up include those with tag lines of “Formula One presenter Natalie Pinkham is preparing for her biggest role yet – that of a mum…”

These are the overarching ideas that are going to lead my research report and back up the observations made in my DA on women in sports media. I’ll link an audio chat below where you can listen further on this research.

Hardin, M & Shain, S 2006, ‘“Feeling Much Smaller than You Know You Are”: The Fragmented Professional Identity of Female Sports Journalists’, Critical studies in media communication, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 322–338.

Baehr, A.R., 2007. Liberal feminism. FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS Of john rawls, p.150.

Hardin, M & Shain, S 2005, ‘Female Sports Journalists: Are we there Yet? “No”’, Newspaper research journal, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 22–35.