Women Sports Reporters

More and more women have been making inroads into traditionally male-dominated occupations, and one of these is sports reporting in all its forms--writing, broadcasting, interviewing. The response shows many that professional sports players and coaches have a good deal to learn about equality, but at the same time the intrusion of women into the locker room raises a number of questions about proper conduct on both sides. The experiences of a number of the women in this profession will illustrate the matter.

Mariah Burton Nelson works in this arena, and she has found that women sports writers and sportscasters are often made the brunt of sexual jokes in the locker room and are treated as less welcome than male reporters. She asks why this is so and offers one opinion when she writes that the locker room culture is a hotbed of latent homosexuality, something that can never be acknowledged openly and that therefore breeds a macho reaction as a form of armor (Nelson 192). Nelson sees the female reporter as a woman with power, and this in particular goads these insecure males to new heights of absurd behavior as a way of proving their manhood to one another at the expense of the woman.

Nelson states that she made her first trip into a men's locker room in 1992 after a football game between the Los Angeles Raiders and the Seattle Seahawks. Nelson was confronted with men who tentatively stated that they were not sure whether women should be in the locker room or not. Some f

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ssment in the workplace has always been a problem and has always been of great importance, but the public's awareness of the issue has not always been high. This changed radically with the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991 and with the accusations of sexual harassment leveled against him by Anita Hill. This event more than any other catapulted sexual harassment to a high position in the public consciousness and made it clear that such activities were degrading to women, harmful to the work environment, and detrimental to public policy. The fact that this problem had been underground for so long also showed that more knowledge of the subject was needed and perhaps that legislation was required to assure a harassment-free workplace in the future. Briggs reports how one editor commented on her bra size and another tried repeatedly to get her to go to a hotel with him. The problem extended outside the newsroom and into society: Some readers had similar problems accepting a woman. I can't remember the number of times I've picked up the phone in the sports department, answered some trivia question, and, when the answer didn't win the guy a bar bet, had the caller demand, "Put a man on this phone" (Briggs 192). Sally

Category: Psychology - W