Published: 27 July 2012
Interview by Emine Saner for The Guardian
Can the Olympics raise the profile of women in sport? Emine Saner meets TalkSport’s Moz Dee and Lisa Smosarski, editor of Stylist magazine and a campaigner for women’s sports.
Lisa Smosarski: We discovered just 5% of coverage goes to purely female sports, and 0.5% of sponsorship. The Fair Game campaign is to increase coverage, working with the BBC and Channel 4 particularly; also looking at funding. There has to be a change in mentality.
Moz Dee: The Olympics is a fantastic opportunity. It is one of the few areas where women have parity. Tessa Sanderson, Sally Gunnell and Denise Lewis are legends. You mentioned sponsorship, and that’s key. You can’t commercialise female sport in the same way, as a broadcaster – the audiences aren’t there.
LS: If we carry on as we are, we’ll never get there – there’s no money behind it. But we have the BBC, which isn’t supposed to be making money out of sport, and isn’t doing enough.
MD: Everything we do at TalkSport is supported by advertising and I guarantee that if I went into the marketplace with a female football tournament, we would struggle to get it sponsored. The BBC is funded by licence payers, and should help grow the audiences.
Emine Saner: You were at Radio 5 Live. How much women’s sport did you cover?
MD: Not enough. As part of the FA deal the women’s final was covered. But it would be unfair to suggest that if we just stick women’s football on the telly, all of a sudden the audience would be there. It needs to evolve.
LS: Do you think there might come a time when you say, “We’re going to make an editorial decision, we’re going to pick a women’s league we wouldn’t traditionally cover”, because there’s a problem?
MD: We are a business, there’s no getting away from that. We can have the debate editorially, and we have done, particularly around women’s football, but it is different from men’s football. Often people think you influence your audience, but it is a two-way street. Your audience dictate where you go, too. While it’s the job of media to question, I’m not sure it’s our job to change what’s happening in society.
LS: We interviewed the women’s football team this year and they said they didn’t want to be compared to the men. It’s about recognition of their sport.
MD: If you cover women’s football, it needs to be done credibly. I’ve seen some awful scenarios where it’s been smirked at.
ES: How do you square that with hiring Andy Gray and Richard Keys as presenters?
MD: They will admit what happened [they were caught on air making sexist remarks about lineswoman Sian Massey, and sacked by Sky as a result] wasn’t right and they were vilified. It seems like a long time ago now, and I wonder when you stop punishing people. They do what they do best, which is talk about sport. They work with women – a lot of our producers are women.
ES: How many female presenters do you have?
MD: We have Georgie Bingham. She is hugely knowledgeable and hosts Sunday Exclusive, one of our most important shows. It’s not us deliberately going out of our way not to employ female presenters, it’s about them being available and we’re trying to develop more.
LS: We’ve been working with the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation and it has found that 61% of sports fans wanted to see more women’s sports televised. Are there sports women excel at that have universal appeal?
MD: Our listenership is interested in Team GB, whoever is in that kit. If you take the women’s football this week, nearly all the papers had them on the front page. Wimbledon is interesting because everyone wants to see the women’s final, but I think women haven’t done themselves any favours in that area, with the Sharapova concept – once they reach a certain point, they either concentrate on winning tournaments or turn into models. The richest rewards are had by people who make millions in advertising deals.
LS: You could argue there are lots of men who you see more of off the field than on. It’s an easy attack on a pretty girl, and that’s the thing – women are treated differently. In one of the papers this week there was a piece on Bradley Wiggins and the headline was “Wiggins beaten by a girl” with a picture of him about 12 being overtaken by a girl. It’s that language – “throw like a girl, run like a girl” – used in a derogatory way. Then there are the “look at the babes” pictures. I have seen more pictures than I care to of the beach volleyball teams. You wouldn’t get the same coverage of men. And the non-traditional feminine characteristics, like aggression and competitiveness, which are important on the sports field, are encouraged out of women early on. At my secondary school the girls’ rugby was stopped after a term because it was “too aggressive”.
MD: At what point does a girl get educated out of a competitive mindset? The idea of a woman being that aggressive, the “come on!” element we expect and demand from male sportsmen – society is clear on what those gender roles should be.
ES: What did the all-male shortlist for the Sports Personality of the Year award tell us about the way women are regarded by much of the sports media?
LS: It’s wrong that Nuts and Zoo were asked, but no equivalent female press. It wasn’t representative, and that was a grave error.
LS: If you can encourage women as fans and participants to be more engaged …
MD: I’m with you on that. It starts with participation. Why do you become a fan? Because you have that emotional engagement, because you’ve experienced it. Why is football the biggest sport? It’s jumpers-for-goalposts, a £2 ball and you’re playing in the street. We need to encourage participation generally, particularly in female sport. Our schools are crap when it comes to providing facilities and training. If you’re a woman trying to compete in sport, you’re surrounded by the cultural pressures, but if you want to be part of a club, where do you go? Tessa Sanderson tries to encourage young people to get involved in sport, but struggles to find funding.
LS: You look at teenage girls and it’s shocking that by age 14 only 12% are doing the amount of exercise they should, because it’s not seen as cool or feminine. It’s a bit chicken-and-egg: if you can’t get the role models, how do you get your next generation of stars to come through? One of the ideas behind getting the Olympics was to inspire a new generation – and you want to make sure that includes girls and women.
To read the interview online, click here