Do women have to be “sexy” to make it as a sports journalist?
Saturday, April 5th, 2020, saw the news emerge that a number of female presenters at Sky Sports were complaining to the necessary powers following a survey sent to the pay-to-view audience asking them to rate the presenters on their appearances.
The survey, released by Sky Sports, gave viewers the chance to vote whether they thought the presenters were “sexy”, “good looking”, “irritating”, “loveable” or “pretentious”.
According to The Times, the survey was commissioned to aid managers when designating certain jobs/roles.
Further to this, it is reported that one of the female presenters only found out about the survey via a family member who has a Sky subscription.
This damning indictment of the broadcaster came as a shock. On further reading, it is even more worrying that this really isn’t that shocking at all.
The Times tweeted a link to its article, as it does with most, if not all, of its articles. And as with all articles, there have been a flurry of responses.
The main picture for the article, and tweet, shows Bela Shah and Emma Paton, sat smiling behind the desk of the Sky Sports news room.
(Photo: The Times)
A host of comments that follow the tweet serve to demonstrate the ideology that the Sky Sports survey were clearly trying to tap into.
“The one on the right would get it…”, one user writes.
“I’d go [with] all three”, writes another.
However, as one user does go on to suggest this survey is a form of “sexist misogyny we were meant to have left in the 70’s”.
And fortunately, a resounding number of people do also seem to agree. However, is it any wonder that female sports presenters are still being objectified and sexualised by their bosses, when they only properly started appearing on our screens in the late 1980s and 90s.
The Trailblazers
Helen Rollason, following several jobs in print and radio as a sports journalist, made the move to television in 1987, covering the World Student Games in Zagreb, for Thames Television.
In 1988, Rollason provided coverage of the Seoul Olympic Games for ITV.
In 1990, Rollason joined BBC Sport, going on to become the first female presenter of Grandstand, one of the longest running sports shows at BBC Sport.
Sadly, Helen Rollason’s career was cut short due to colon cancer, but her legacy lives on through the next generation of female sports reporters her career inspired.
One of those women is the widely known, multiple-award winning, sports presenter Gabby Logan.
Logan went on to be one of the next small handful of women to break into terrestrial television in the 90’s.
Joining ITV as their first female sports presenter in the late 1990s, co-hosting On the Ball, one of the channels main football programmes.
However, like many young women on screen today, her appearance has, unsurprisingly, been commented on throughout her career.
Her own colleague on the ITV football show The Premiership, Jimmy Hill, commented in 2001, that Gabby is “very intelligent and very pretty”.
A compliment on her appearance, is never too far behind any other form of praise.
Female sports broadcasters: 20 trailblazers
Mary Raine, first woman to cover football match for BBC Radio ‘Sports Report’ (1969)
Sally Jones, BBC Breakfast’s first female sports anchor (1986)
Helen Rollason, first female presenter of BBC’s Grandstand (1990)
Eleanor Oldroyd, first female presenter for BBC’s ‘Sport Report’ (1995)
Sue Barker, first female to host BBC’s ‘Question of Sport’ (1997)
Gabby Logan, first female anchor of ITV show ‘On the ball’ (1998)
Celina Hinchcliffe, first woman to present Football Focus (2006)
Jacqui Oatley, first woman to commentate on MoTD (2007)
Clare Balding, first woman to commentate on a Wimbledon final (2010)
Rebecca Lowe, first woman to host an FA Cup final (ESPN 2012)
Lee McKenzie, first female presenter to take main anchor role in F1 (2012)
Charlotte Green, first woman to read out football scores (BBC 2013)
Alison Mitchell, first female commentator of Test Match Special (2014)
Isa Guha, first female expert summariser for Test Match Special (2014)
Maggie Alphonsi, first woman pundit on live men’s rugby (ITV 2015)
Eniola Aluko, first female pundit on MoTD/MoTD2, and also first on live men’s football (ITV 2016)
Kelly Cates, first to anchor live Sky Sports Premier League matches (2017)
Alex Scott, first female pundit on live Sky games (2018)
Vicki Sparks, first female commentator on televised World Cup match (2018)
As you can see from the list of “trailblazers” published by The Telegraph, many firsts for women in sports reporting have only happened in the last 5 years.
So, is it really surprising that the conversations around female sports presenters and reporters are so archaic when the employment of women is more akin to that of the 1920s, than the 2020s.
This is not the first-time Sky Sport has come under fire.
In 2013, Labour MP Jim Sheridan put it to broadcasters that those appearing on screen were “young and attractive with one or two exceptions” — while male colleagues tended to be “middle-aged, fat and bald”.
Sky Sports and the BBC responded, by noting that all of their female presenters were there on journalistic integrity, and that appearances did not factor into decisions. However, the news of the survey appearing yesterday suggests this may not be true.
Regardless of what broadcaster’s claim, it is undeniable that news of this survey, whatever its intention, is not only incredibly degrading and insulting to the women affected, but will have broader reaching consequences on young women who may have wanted to pursue sports journalism in the first place.
For those girls who are facing the question of what do you want to be when you grow up, their options are boiled down to “sexy”, “good looking”, “irritating”, “loveable” or “pretentious”.
The responsibility does not fall on women or girls to tick a box, and certainly not one of the five Sky Sports chose.
The responsibility falls on broadcasters to create and nurture respectful and safe working environments.
Maybe then, it wouldn’t be so shocking to see a woman talking about sport on the TV, and there may one day be more than you can count on two hands.
So, no, women should not need to be sexy, but clearly it helps.
