Women still under-represented in Star’s sports coverage

Jill, a long-time Star reader, didn’t hold back in a recent letter forwarded to me concerning our sports coverage.

Visually, the Star’s sports section is very nearly an exclusively male world, she said. She explained that since moving to Toronto in the late 1980s she has leafed through the sports section daily, looking for photos of women and girls — but very little has changed in all those years.

She noted that aside from columnists, on October 5, 6, 7, 8 and 12 not a single woman or girl was visible. (I went back and looked at the pages to confirm this and she is correct).

She went on to say it’s “long past time for the sports section to make space for women.” Her concerns have implications beyond just photographs, of course. They also suggest a paucity of sports stories about women.

It’s not a new issue. In North America the “big four” professional men’s sports leagues dominate coverage.

In a statement on gender equity in the media, UNESCO says that while 40 per cent of all participants in sports worldwide are female, women’s sports garner about four per cent of all sports coverage.

After reading Jill’s letter, I wondered what steps our sports department is taking to get more photos and stories of women in our newspaper and on our website.

I was also curious to hear our sports editor’s philosophy on the issue, given digital traffic and online views play an influential role in determining what gets covered and published.

I shared Jill’s letter with Dave Washburn, Star sports editor since 2016, and he said he agrees more needs to be done.

He said he’s constantly striving to highlight women’s stories. There are space limitations in print, but online provides more opportunities to present women’s sports, he noted.

Numerous features and news reports on female athletes like Canadian golf sensation Brooke Henderson, U.S. tennis great Serena Williams, and Canada’s Olympic gold medal-winning women’s soccer team have featured prominently both in photos and stories online and print recently, Washburn pointed out.

And it’s not as simple as men only following men’s sports and women following women’s sports. There’s a lot of crossover, Washburn said.

Still, there are hard realities.

“If you look at a good chunk of the online data and what it tells us in terms of readership, page views and subscriptions, it is that women’s sports or features on women are often at the bottom of those numbers,” Washburn said.

Though a lot of his department’s resources “go toward what we know people will come to us for, and that is coverage of the big-name sports teams,” he said “there are stories that need to be covered regardless of the data.”

As an example, he pointed to veteran Star basketball writer Doug Smith’s recent coverage of the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. (Though the games were held in Australia, Smith reported on the tournament and the performance of Canada’s national women’s basketball team while travelling with and covering the Toronto Raptors’ pre-season games here).

“When you look at the data on page views it’s barely a dent. Doug still felt and we still felt that for the section it was worth covering,” Washburn said.

I asked him why he and Smith took that approach.

“It was an elite level of basketball with some of our best women in the country. Doug is dedicated to covering all things Canada Basketball … and the women are a significant part of that,” Washburn said.

So, it’s about forging ahead when the story warrants and not always feeling beholden to what that might mean in terms of online clicks.

Kerry Gillespie, a Star sports writer for seven years who reports on amateur sports and has covered three Olympic Games, agrees with the letter writer Jill that there isn’t enough representation of women on the sports pages.

“Not just photos. There aren’t enough stories of women in the sports section,” Gillespie told me, a point Washburn agreed on.

She said she takes deliberate steps to try to rectify this imbalance. “My primary focus is the Olympic sports. I try to highlight female athletes as much as possible,” she said.

“As a woman, I’m also very aware of how little coverage women in sports get, so I do put extra effort into finding and telling the stories of female athletes and including women’s voices when it comes to coaches, referees, experts.”

It’s not always easy. Gillespie mentioned a recent incident in which a sports federation in Canada kept sending her names of male athletes to interview for a story.

“A lot of sports are male dominated, and the people the sports organizations put forward tend to be men, so you have to say ‘no, I want someone else. How about a woman?’” Gillespie said.

Is there any way to track and gauge progress the section is making on this front, I wonder?

Retired Star writer Mary Ormsby, whose long career at the paper included 35 years covering sports, said setting quotas for photos and stories on women isn’t the best remedy.

An audit of the content in the section over a long period of time — a whole year rather than a few weeks — would provide deeper insights into what needs to be done, she said.

As for finding sports stories on women, Ormsby agrees that it just takes a little effort. “But once you get into the flow and idea of thinking that way … compelling, beautiful, deep stories will bring readers in.”

With that as your target, it’s harder to strike out, I say.

Donovan Vincent is the Star’s Public Editor. Email: publiced@thestar.ca