Last week, we posted a story on Cassie Campbell and her climb up the sportscasting ranks in Canada. It is an excellent read and provides some real in-depth stories behind her daily routine, her prep and her nay-sayers. You see, Cassie is female. An incredibly talented sportscaster in her own right, a very good player in her day and from what I hear…a nice person. But she’s female. And in sportscasting, being female can throw up a lot of road blocks. It’s called gender bias.
Gender bias is ripe in sportscasting. It’s an industry dominated by men, and it’s an industry that is largely just recently overcoming a race bias too. But being a female sportscaster can subject you to countless unprovoked verbal assaults both in your professional life (while you’re on air), and in your personal world as well.
Being a white male, I won’t pretend to know what that’s like and the strength it requires to brush that aside day after day…but Forbes recently posted an excellent article detailing gender discrimination in sportscasting and why it has to stop.
A google search for “female sportscaster” turns up as the first four entries: “10 of the Sexiest Female Sportscasters,” “75 Hottest Female Sportscasters on TV–Busted Coverage,” “The Top 50 Hottest Woman Sportscasters,” and the “40 Hottest Female Sports Reporters.” A search under “male sportscasters” turns up nothing analagous, perhaps because many male sportscasters would not rate highly for sexiness.
The point, however, is that sexiness has nothing to do, and should have nothing to do, with sportscasting, which requires sports knowledge, credibility, a good voice and the ability to speak in public. The fact that females are being judged/categorized in this way, plus the paucity of female sportscasters (especially doing play-by-play for a major professional sport) clearly shows gender discrimination.
Click here for the full article.
