This week, I chose to analyze Street & Smith's SportBusiness Journal. This weekly publication, has a network of over 80 writers, and provides breaking news, comprehensive reporting and analyzing on the world of sport business. From everything to media, marketing, athletes, facilities and finance, Sport Business Journal provides a weekly input on the fast paced sport world.
What I thought was most ironic about analyzing women in the Sport Business Journal, was that SBJ has numerous articles that talk about the underrepresentation and sexualization of women in sport. However, Sports Business Journal is guilty of the same crime. One article, " Despite progress, diversity hiring in sport media is still poor," in which Sport Business Journal criticizes sport media for the lack of diversity within its staff. This article found that 90 percent of sport columnist writers were male, 90 percent of sport editors were male and 88 percent of sport reporters were male. In spirit of doing my own research I decided to randomly click on articles published between January 1, 2014 and today's date February 26th, 2015 throughout the website, I clicked 25 random articles, and found no female authors. Frustrated with the lack of female representation on the board, I decided to look up a specific list of SBJ authors. On a list of 15 Featured Authors, there was one woman. Her job at Sport Business Journal is to cover horse racing and labor disputes.
On Sport Business Journal's home page, there are 15 main categories that readers are select articles from. These include categories such as Marketing and Sponsorship, Featured, Media, Leagues and Governing Bodies, Labor and Agents and Facilities. Each category shows the 5 most recent articles in that selection for a grand total of 75 articles available on the home page alone. Of those 75 articles there are 0 pictures provided of females by any standard. No reporters, fans or female athletes are visible on Sport Business Journal's homepage. In addition of those 75 articles, ONE article focuses on female sports -- the WNBAPA has a new attorney.
Wanting to cut Sport Business Journal some slack, I clicked a few articles that could have potentially had females involved, such as " Engineers to assist NFL with injury prevention." No luck for woman in that article. I focused my attention on an article titled " Levi's Stadium Number Don't Lie," in which no females were mentioned in the article, however a female did make it into a picture on the article. Naturally, she is a petite blonde young aged girl posing with her smart phone. At least we females kind of made it in there...
As a female who likes sports just as much as any body else, the lack of female representation in the sporting world is extremely disheartening. I chose Sport Business Journal not because it only looks at athletes or fans, but because it covers a wide range of all things sport industry related. By choosing to ignore the issue of gender inequality in sports media, Sport Business Journal is just adding to the problem they criticized.
I thought that it was interesting that even in the business side of sport females were so under represented.
ReplyDelete- Baber
Can't wait till us female sport managers take over the sport world, Babes.
ReplyDelete- Nikki
Love thearticle, do you think if more female articles showed up they would be criticized in a negative way or appreciated?
ReplyDelete-Ikko
Guess we won't know if that never happens. Articles, regardless of who they are written or who they feature will be criticized, which is something that both men and woman alike have to deal with.
ReplyDelete- Nikki
DeleteVery interesting post! It's interesting to see that this phenomenon still happens even in the business/academic world. I would have liked to see you pull in some additional literature on the subject to back-up your ideas.
ReplyDelete~Brittainy