Sportswomen Spend Money Too

The Amateur Athletic Foundation recently reported in a study that local television stations under-report women’s sports and female athletes (Larry Stewart’s TV/Radio column, Sports, Aug. 12). According to Stewart, one way to correct this gender imbalance is to hire more female sportscasters.

While this is a laudable goal, we have seen that hiring of women and minorities for visible anchor positions in television fails to bring a much-needed balance to overall news coverage, whether crime or sports. So, while I welcome more female sportscasters, it doesn’t assure they’ll cover women’s sports events.

The truth is, news anchors do not make decisions on what is broadcast. Station management, dominated for decades by men, as all entertainment and media companies have been, decides what entertainment and news we receive. According to the 1994 Women, Men and Media annual survey, men do stories about other men 76% of the time on television news.

The only way to ever change decisions made by male media executives is to change the financial balance in their advertising dollars. A friend of mine who worked for a very powerful advertising agency told me about her effort in the ‘70s to get the agency to support a beer campaign aimed at women.

Since her client was a major Midwestern beer company, there was a lot of male tradition to overcome both at the brewery and the ad agency. Her research showed that women buy the beer, not men. It made sense to her that the ads begin to depict women bonding over a beer the way men do. She was sure sales would soar, but she could not persuade her agency to take the chance, even for one quarter’s worth of advertising. The idea was never even presented to the client.

My point is not to glamorize women drinking beer but to get advertisers of all sorts of products associated with sports to recognize a fact and an opportunity: There has been a generational shift in how many of us feel about sports.

Last year, at age 48, I challenged the NCAA to allow older female athletes the chance to compete in college sports. I won. In doing my homework, I was stunned to discover that the NCAA did not sanction women’s competition on college campuses until 1981. But what a sea of change has occurred in the world of sports in the last 10 years as a result--a whole new generation of female athletes has charged onto the scene. We are interested in more than fashionable athletic wear, sturdy athletic shoes and trendy beer and sports drinks; we take our athletics very seriously.

The resulting lifestyle changes show up everywhere. Not all family gatherings now end with the same old ritual--the men adjourn to the living room to watch football, the women do the dishes. That pattern is a relic from a generation that told its girls that sports were only for “tomboys,” not young ladies. That pattern existed before the advent of women’s sports at colleges and universities, before the advent of Martina, before Title IX and the explosive expansion of sports for girls.

Another friend of mine just sent his daughter off to a prestigious East Coast college on a full four-year volleyball scholarship. That would never have happened when I was a girl. It has taken a lot of women a lot of years to come to terms with our athletic power and prowess. It has taken a full generation of college and professional women’s sports to allow us the dignity of competing without being labeled “boy crazy” or any other pejorative term. But we’re still relegated to the “back of the bus” when it comes to media sports coverage. Women’s sports coverage still has the air of accommodating rather than respecting our achievements. “Skategate” nearly undid us. Although it was the first time a women’s sport achieved the kind of blanket coverage that ordinarily goes to men, the Tonya and Nancy story took on soap-opera rather than athletic proportions.

Corporate America is missing the boat. There is real money here, fellas. Yes, hire female sportscasters--but more important, turn them loose on sports news about women. The inevitable result will be a whole new advertising audience you never dreamed existed. We are out there by the hundreds of thousands, running, training, biking, hiking, playing all forms of sports, not on strike, and hungry for the recognition we deserve.