Blazing Trails
Female sports journalists have made inroads in recent years. But full equality is still a ways off STORY BY DESIREE GARCIA PHOTOS BY MATHILDA DE VILLIERS
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aren Thomson’s love of competition drew her to sports as a child, though she never could have guessed what challenges awaited her as she progressed within the journalistic niche. Thomson, a veteran of TV and radio, credits her sports-loving dad for suggesting she pursue a career in sports broadcasting. Her family had always supported and nurtured her love of competition, enrolling her in an array of extracurricular activities and encouraging her passion for softball. “I’m a little ball of competitiveness,” Thomson says, remembering the victory she felt the first time she hit a home run. Thomson graduated from the journalism program at Columbia Academy in Vancouver in 2005 and went on to become a news anchor for News 1130, where she stayed for almost four years before moving on to cover sports at CTV Vancouver. Throughout her years as a sports reporter, she found the industry to be dominated by men and felt significant pressure to fit in “with the boys.” “You just need to prove yourself even more so,” she says. “If you make one tiny mistake, people are on you.” According to an International Sports Press Survey in 2011, more than 90 per cent of sports articles that year were
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written by male journalists, while only eight per cent were written by women. In a pointed attempt to rectify gender inequality in the field, many North American newsrooms have worked to bring more women to prominence in recent years, with moderate results. Thomson says gender discrimination still exists in the sports newsroom. People often questioned how she got her job, or assumed she’d stumbled into sports from the news department, never guessing that sports reporting had been a lifelong dream. She felt the men were never asked these questions or expected to explain their presence in the newsroom. The legal right of female reporters to have the same access as men to athletes was given via a 1978 court judgment in the United States after Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke was barred from Major League Baseball locker rooms. But that one case hardly settled issues of inequality. In 1990, writer Lisa Olson filed a lawsuit after being harassed in a National Football League locker room—one of many stories of bullying, harassment and conflict faced by women covering the sports beat. In their 2013 essay The Glass Ceiling and Beyond, journalism professors Erin Whiteside at the University of Tennessee and Marie Hardin at Penn State blame inequalities in sports media on a
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