At the recent award for Sports Personality of the Year in the UK there was some controversy raised as there were no women on the final shortlist of 10. The BBC’s programme Women’s Hour discussed the situation and interviewed Claire Spalding, a well-known sports reporter and presenter. She looked at the main newspapers that day and listed the following statistics on their coverage of women in sport:
- Times: 14 pages of sport – no mention of a woman
- Daily Mail: 13 pages of sport – 3 lines about Venus Williams, tennis player
- Independent: 12 pages of sport – no mention of a woman
- Telegraph: 20 pages of sport – one piece about the female BBC head of sport
- Guardian: 10 pages of sport – one piece about Hayley Turner, jockey
- Mirror: 13 pages of sport – one piece about Hayley Turner.
As Claire commented, you would think that, on any given day, women don’t take part in sport at all.
One football manager, Ian Holloway, thought that the problem was not the media coverage, but the fact that ‘maybe women just haven’t been good enough this year.’ I wonder if he would feel the same way if his team’s press coverage was the same as that of some very successful sports women?
Faced with the above statistics, it seems that the fact remains that to get onto the list for Sport’s Personality of the year the main criteria is profile, not performance. And if your profile is not raised by the media, then your chances of making it onto the list are pretty slim.
