Sports By The (Gendered) Numbers

Here’s an article by Gregg Easterbrook. It’s part of his usual “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” series. If you have a good three hours to spare (his articles are usually pretty lengthy, you should take a peak at it. Why does this apply to this blog? Here’s an excerpt:

     “Women are taking more of the available slots in college at the same time boys are  spending more time playing football. Are these two facts related?”

There you go. Take a look if you’re interested, which if you’re reading this, I don’t know why you wouldn’t be.

I’m currently writing this as I’m conducting analysis of SportsCenter. Don’t worry, I’m writing this during commercials so that my attention isn’t split between writing and attempting to analyze content. I’m also glad that I didn’t split my attention, because otherwise I would’ve missed something completely ridiculous.

First of all, as I analyze the content of SportsCenter episodes, I not only write down time spent on different stories and who’s doing the reporting, I also keep track of what’s being reported. With that being said, tonight I thought was going to be a great night (and by great, I mean compared to the other nights I’ve examined thus far, which have been thoroughly depressing when they weren’t infuriating), but I was very wrong.

Tonight may have had more female correspondents reporting on male sports than any other night I’ve looked at it thus far (there were three! Oh wait…there were only three…), but apparently women reporters and women’s sports can’t beat out a squirrel that ran across the batter’s box during the St. Louis Cardinals-Philadelphia Phillies NLDS playoff game. Yes, you read that correctly. A squirrel running across a baseball field is more worthy of reporting than the finals of a female sport, which I might add, is the ONLY professional basketball being played right now. The squirrel received coverage in three different segments, and even had a correspondent (and by correspondent, I mean not one of the anchors) do a special story on the squirrel and the players around the area where it ran. I’m not joking. Three segments given to a squirrel, and even included discussion by the anchors of the squirrel’s new twitter page, and how one of the coaches of the Cardinals discussed how he would’ve shot the thing if he’d had a gun with him, since he hunted them when he was younger. Nothing quite says, “We’re pandering to a male audience, we know it, and we don’t care” quite like talking about squirrels, baseball, guns, and hunting all in the same segment. Oh, wait for it, a fourth mention of the squirrel!

Normally, I wouldn’t care about how many times something as random as a squirrel was discussed during an episode of SportsCenter. I do, however, care when it’s discussed and has more time devoted to it than was given to coverage of a sport featuring women who are in the midst of a battle for their sport’s championship. By the way, did you know that Minnesota is one game away from winning the championship? No? That’s because if you blinked, changed the channel, or got up to pee, you missed any and all discussion of the WNBA Finals on SportsCenter tonight.

This just goes to show why I’m doing what I’m doing, and why I’ve undertaken this project. No matter how many summits are held by espnW, or how many crazy dramatic games are played by women (USA v. Brazil, 2011 Women’s World Cup, anyone?) that promote them, women’s sports will not be relevant and cannot be relevant until major sports networks and shows as popular as SportsCenter deem them as equally or more relevant than something as random as a squirrel, and give them (them being women’s sports and athletes, not squirrels) the attention they deserve. Think about it.

In perusing espn.com this evening, like I do, I was reminded of the film ESPN produced on Renee Richards, the first transgendered female to play professional tennis. I was surprised and very glad to see that the first airing of the film, which happened this evening, was given one of the five coveted spots in the “top stories” section of the espn.com website.

I may have issues with ESPN, but tonight they got this right. I applaud them for not only making the film, but putting it in a place where it would receive significantly more attention than if it was buried further down on the webpage.

For a great article on Richards and the film, check this out.

For a preview and summary of the film, go here.

Sometimes people actually do decent work and ask intelligent questions, like “What do women watch?” Consider this the rare occasion that women are actually acknowledged as being sports fans that isn’t made into some sort of joke.

Click me.

Thank you, Forbes.

Alright, so there will be a slight alteration to the project…I will have to wait to post this until I have a minimum of seven days content to analyze, and these days have to be days during which significant women’s sporting events take place. Now by significant I mean something like a tennis tournament or some sort of soccer game, like an international friendly. This might take a while, but hey, that’s part of the problem with this whole women in sports thing. At a time of year where we’ve got the NFL in full force, playoff baseball, an impending NHL season, and a continuing NBA lockout that is often a focus of media, women’s sports (of the few going on) are rarely mentioned, and seen even less often. I could even argue that these major sports leagues never really have an “off-season,” but I’ll save that for a later post.

Also, I may or may not turn this blog concept into an academic paper/presentation. I have yet to decide this. Plus the people running the conferences have to send me an email saying something like, “Why we wouldn’t be able to survive if you didn’t come to our campus and do a presentation!” Okay so it probably wouldn’t sound like that in reality, but that’s exactly what such an email would say in my head.

Alright, relatively inexperienced blogger here, so please be patient with me as I figure this out. Now what’s this whole blog all about? Well, upon doing some self-reflection and trying to figure out exactly what I want to do with my life given that I’ll be finishing up grad school soon-ish, I came up with the idea for this blog. It came about after I asked myself what I care about after reading a quote from the wonderful Lisa Leslie (of WNBA fame) that instructed me to do what I’m passionate about. When I asked myself, “Hey, what do you really care about?” my answer was pretty simple. I care about three main things: 1. Sports, 2. Math (I have a degree in Statistics. Don’t judge me.), and 3. Feminism/Gender issues. Yep, I’m one of those not-crazy/completely rational, man-loving, leg-shaving feminists who dares to think that equality is a good thing that society has yet to truly achieve. Anyways, this blog is a result of me trying to come up with ways to combine those three very different passions of mine. It should be an interesting adventure. I’ll probably do nothing more than embarrass myself and/or make people mad, but hey, I’m fine with that, or at least the embarrassment part. Sometimes I think that a day without embarrassing yourself is almost like a day wasted.

The first idea that I would like to toss out there for all three readers (which I’m pretty sure are family members or friends I coerced into to read this) to digest is how numbers really define sports. Think about it. There are obvious ways, like scores, keeping time, team records, and statistics for teams and/or individual players. I dare you to try and describe your favorite athletic team without using a single number. For example I could say: I am a fan of the Green Bay Packers, and they are one of the best teams in the NFL this season, but I love them because of their integrity and all they do for the community. Boring, right? Now, I could use numbers and say something like this: The Packers are my favorite team, and at 3-0, they’re one of the best teams in the NFL this season, with one of the top rated quarterbacks in the league in Aaron Rodgers, using both his Passer Rating and QBR rankings as proof (he’s usually not outside the top 3). My argument is much more sports-y and acceptable to hardcore sports fans when I use some statistics to back it up. That’s why numbers will be used to back up the gendered arguments I’m making about sports. Still with me? Yes? Great. Moving on.

The first project I’m undertaking for this blog is a basic analysis of the current breakdown of sports coverage of the world leader in sports: ESPN. With espnW (Yes, that’s a real branch of ESPN. See?) currently presenting a summit on Women + Sports in Tucson, it’s important to not just discuss the status of women in sports, but the status of women’s sports in the larger sports world as well. This first project will then be very simple; I will watch note, and analyze the daily content of ESPN’s main website, as well as nightly episodes of SportsCenter for seven days. I would do the prime-time episodes, but that whole going to class part of grad school gets in the way. I’ll then post and let the results speak for themselves.  I’m also more than willing to take suggestions of what to tackle next (rude/offensive ones don’t count) and questions either of the two of you reading this (because I’m sure I’ve lost someone by now) may have.

Also, all of them won’t be this long. Hopefully. Or maybe they will because I’ll have that much to say. It might be another one of those “stick with me” things.