Submitted by media girl on 14 October 2005 - 4:50pm
This week I've been a bit busy with work and a bit burned out on politics and all that, but I think this piece by Joan Ryan is worth passing on:
A million years ago when I first became a sports columnist, some of the sportswriters at the Florida newspaper where I worked took me out for a beer. They were well-meaning guys trying to help a 24-year-old woman who had no clue what she was getting herself into.
Don't be a "female" columnist, they said. You won't be taken seriously. Grateful, I mimicked their writing styles for months until one day, the obvious flaw in their advice hit me. I was female. I was a sports columnist. I had no choice but to be a female sports columnist.
More important, I came to understand why female voices on the sports pages were valuable. It's not that women write differently from men. What's different is their choice of topics and the lens through which they view them. Domestic violence, inequities in athletic scholarships and resources, sexual orientation -- all were pulled from the shadows of sports when women began showing up in stadium press boxes.
So when a study released Tuesday revealed that just 14 percent of the guests on the influential Sunday morning political talk shows are women, and that 56 percent of the episodes included no women at all, I wondered if anyone was surprised.
Read the whole thing.
[Link from Marisacat via email.]
Comments
2 comments postedHas Title Nine had more than significant influence for women in sports?
David
I haven't done an official study or anything, but I don't think we would be seeing women today winning Olympic events in track, soccer, softball, volleyball without Title IX. I think there's no question it's helped, especially with the team sports.
But of course it's not perfect. College money especially is driven towards money-making.
There's also a significant difference in sports vs. politics: in sports, women's physical size and strength is an important factor in most sports, so we don't have many women who could play any position in football, for example. (I'd say a battle-of-the-sexes match in tennis today would be pretty interesting, though, decades after Billy Jean King played Bobby Riggs.)
But in politics, size doesn't matter. It's about intelligence, integrity, insight, character, and men don't automatically dominate in those areas. But they dominate politics, and we as a culture don't blink at that. Why?