By Meredith McGroarty

Ever notice how rare it is to hear a female voice giving the play-by-play during a football game? Or how a newspaper’s list of sports columnists rarely contains a woman’s name?

According to research conducted by Erin Whiteside, an assistant professor in the College of Communication and Information, the scarcity of women in sports media is rooted in myriad gender issues, including the perception of sports as a masculine activity, the lack of family-friendly policies for women, and workplaces that can breed sexual harassment and discrimination.

“As a society we’ve culturally associated sports as a space in which we can showcase and celebrate masculinity, and it has been difficult for women to enter that world,” Whiteside says.

Erin Whiteside

Before pursuing her doctoral degree, Whiteside was an assistant editor for Major League Baseball and worked in the sports information office at Pennsylvania State University. She always knew she wanted to work in the sports field, particularly women’s sports. However, she says she was troubled by “problematic” workplace practices at her jobs and drew upon those experiences when developing her research agenda.

Whiteside’s research is based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches with women in sports media professions. So far, she has surveyed approximately 600 individuals from a variety of sports media backgrounds and has ten papers either published or forthcoming that explore the attitudes and experiences of sports media professionals, including women.

One of the discoveries Whiteside made was that women in sports media are often challenged even before they tackle their first assignment, namely by problematic stereotypes, such as questions about their sexuality or their motives for working in the profession.

“The field can be like a maze for women, with no way out,” she says. “When women enter sports media professions, they are effectively entering a space that has been culturally marked as masculine. As a result, they often face questions about why they have crossed that boundary, and some women may feel like their sexuality is under scrutiny.” If they’re incorrectly assumed to be lesbians, for example, women may try to combat that stigma by adopting more feminine haircuts or wardrobes. But even if a woman “proves” her heterosexuality, there is a tendency to suspect her motives for working in sports—for example, that she’s only looking for a romantic relationship with a coach or player.

“My research with female sports information directors has shown that there’s pressure to explain why they’re working in the sports field,” Whiteside says. “So you prove your heterosexuality, but you might be seen as unprofessional or be subject to sexual advances. It creates a really problematic work environment.”

Whiteside found that most women who go into sports media typically leave after six to ten years, and part of the reason has to do with the difficulty of working while also being a wife and mother. Night games, weekend games, last-minute crises—all of these things disrupt family life.

Another reason women leave the profession often has to do with their relative lack of professional mobility. Job duties are largely split along gender lines—women often work with women’s sports, and men work with men’s sports.

In fact, in the entire sports field, women comprise only 10 percent of sports information department heads, 10 percent of sports editors, and 10 percent of sports writers.

“The high-status sports are [men’s] football and basketball,” she says. “If women are never getting the opportunity to work in those sports, they will never get the experience they need in terms of leadership. I am not trying to minimize women’s sports; I’d love to see women’s sports achieve more visibility. But right now, women aren’t getting the opportunity to gain the high visibility they could during, say, a Saturday football game.”

She adds that even women who do work in men’s sports often do not get the plum jobs, like play-by-play announcer or sports columnist—positions that exercise the authority to analyze and explain the activity—although many are employed as in-game reporters.

“I think a huge problem women face is the argument that they never played football or whichever sport is in question, so it’s impossible to be an expert,” Whiteside says. “I’ve found in my research that the constant need to prove their aptitude to do a job that does not require previous experience playing sports is a very difficult thing for women to endure on a daily basis.”

After all, Al Michaels and Dennis Miller landed commentator spots on Monday Night Football despite never having played the sport professionally.

Whiteside says there are several strategies for dealing with problems for women in the sports media field. One involves addressing homophobic behavior and sexual harassment in the workplace; another would entail creating policies that make the workplace more family-friendly for women with children. Also, making the division of labor and beat assignments less gender-stratified would help.

“Part of what I try to argue is that those at the top need to set some examples,” Whiteside says. “If we can see diversity as a social justice issue and not just a women’s issue, that would move things in a more positive direction.”