 Well, good afternoon. Thanks for coming to my presentation on the book I wrote last year called, Who Let Them In, Pathbreaking Women in Sports Journalism. It was published by Roman and Littlefield in June 2022 and Jackie McMullen, who I've known for 40 years, has written the foreword and she's the author of five books about basketball. What I want to talk about this afternoon is the progress women have made in sports journalism from the beginning when, well, there really weren't any women writing sports until now when most of the time you will see women's names in newspapers and certainly you'll see lots of women's sports journalists on TV. So how did we get there? Well, the 60s and 70s, as everybody knows, were a time in which women, the women's movement was really coming to bear and thanks to it, women started thinking about alternative careers. 1970 was a pivotal moment because 46 staffers at Newsweek Magazine complained to the EEOC that they were not being given opportunities to advance at the magazine. It took the EEOC two years to rule, but in the meantime, a lot of media companies decided that maybe they better get in front of this and start thinking about women, hiring women and giving them opportunities to advance. So the changing climate had a lot to do with women coming into sports journalism, but the struggles that women in sports journalism faced were really more acute than anywhere else in media. And that's because they weren't just having to battle people who thought they should be back in the kitchen, they were also battling people who thought they didn't know anything about sports and they shouldn't be talking about sports and interviewing people about sports. And so that was an obstacle that the early pioneers had to face and hurdle. And it took a lot of tenacity, confidence, passion for what they were doing and optimism too. And that's why I think it's so important to separate the women in sports from other women in media at that time. A lot of people always ask me, how did I get the idea for this book? And it really sprang from a book that I had written five years before called Finding a Way to Play, The Pioneering Spirit of Women in Basketball. It occurred to me that the women that I had interviewed, the women basketball players I had interviewed had a lot of tenacity and they were struggling against a lot of the same sexist stereotypes that people that wanted to keep them from playing the game they love. And so I started thinking about women in sports journalism because I had been one a sports journalist for three years before I moved to the newsroom in the 1980s. So I wanted to know how these women had fared in the decades since. And again, I knew just from the few people that I didn't know that they had a lot of Hutzpah, a lot of tenacity and I knew that they would probably had a lot of good stories to tell. I started the book with Mary Garber who was probably, she was the earliest pioneer in sports writing. She, her career spanned more than 50 years, she started in 1947. Before Mary, women who were writing about sports were generally seen as novelties. So Jane Dixon, for example, who wrote for the New York Daily News back in the late 20s, early 30s would write about boxing matches but she would write it from a woman's point of view. Mary probably saw some of these columns and she probably got the idea that maybe she could do it because I know she was a fan of boxing and other sports too. So when it came time for her to graduate from college, she was living in Winston Salem at the time and she got a job with the newspaper there not as a sports writer, but when she was finished for the day, clerking or other things she was doing in the newsroom, she would walk over to the sports department and just keep bugging the editor and saying, you know, I wanna write sports, I wanna write sports. And finally, he said, okay. So she was a beat reporter, a columnist and I think the other thing that's important about Mary is that she was a mentor to other women. Over the course of her career, another thing that Mary's known for is integrating the sports pages because before Mary, there really weren't a lot of stories about black athletes and the competitions between black high schools. To Mary, this made no sense. She knew there were a lot of good stories going on and she knew that there were a lot of interesting people she could write about. And so she started covering the black high schools and other papers followed suit. So she really does get a lot of credit for that. Now a lot of people didn't know Mary existed until the 1990s and that's because there was no internet and she really stayed in one regional area. And so if you weren't a sports reporter yourself, you probably didn't know Mary existed. But when the internet came along and other newspapers from across the country decided she would make a good story, people found out about her and who she was and what she had accomplished. The Association for Women in Sports Media named their annual Pioneer Award after her. The first one was issued in 1999 and Mary was able to follow the progress that was made by other women who followed in her footsteps. She actually kept writing on a part-time basis her career was 57 years in all and she finally retired in the early 2000s. Leslie Visser was probably the first sports journalist in the modern era, I guess you could say. I love this quote by Bryant Gumbel. He says, any woman who ever aspired to do what Leslie Visser has done probably got the idea from Leslie. Where she got the idea to write about sports, well really, again, she had no role models. She just knew she loves sports. Growing up, she grew up in the Boston area and she read the Boston Globe and she just knew because of her love in sports and her love of writing that this was something she wanted to do. I think Leslie really inspired a lot of people. I know she inspired me. Her byline really convinced a lot of sports loving women in New England, like I said, including me, that they could pursue a career in sports journalism. She also was the first woman to make the transition from writing for a daily newspaper to broadcasting. That was in 1984 and that led to the list of accomplishments that you can see on this page. I think one of the ones that she's really very proud of is that she was the first woman enshrined in Pro Football's Hall of Fame. That's because she did such a good job covering football and she also was the first to provide coverage for a host of events, the NBA Finals, the World Series, the Final Four, and Monday Night Football. And again, she was somebody who was battling those stereotypes. What do you know about basketball? What do you know about baseball? Bobby Knight, the famous basketball coach, used to be very sarcastic when she would ask a question, but she would just give it right back to him because she obviously did know what she was talking about. And I think, like I said, Leslie really has also been very important to a generation of women who saw her come along and do what she did and be so successful. And I think she takes seriously her role as an ambassador. In fact, Leslie just got back from a trip to Uzbekistan where she has mentored young female sports journalists as well as athletes in that country. Now, Leslie wasn't the very first woman to appear on TV and neither was Phyllis George. I think a lot of people think Phyllis George, who's pictured in this slide, was the very first broadcasting pioneer. That honor really belongs to Jane Chastain, who was part of the CBS NFL broadcast team in 1974. Jane had been successful on the regional level at a smaller station, and CBS thought that, gee, maybe we can bring her up to the big leagues, so to speak, and she could do her thing there. The problem was the audience wasn't ready for Jane. I mean, she knew her stuff, but those stereotypes that she shouldn't really be doing this, really dogged her. Again, it was before Twitter, so there weren't mean tweets. However, the station got plenty of letters saying, get this woman out of here. I think CBS tried to change the coverage a little bit. They'd have her do person on the street interviews with women and try to play up her own femininity, but Jane really had been successful as a real reporter, as a real analyst about football and other sports, and she didn't really want any part of that, so she went back to the local station where she'd been successful and just picked up her career again. That's when Phyllis George came along. Again, CBS decided, well, we like the idea of having a woman, however, it's got to be somebody the audience is going to approve of, and so Phyllis, who had been Miss America, I can't remember the year, she was already well known and obviously attractive, articulate. She made no bones about the fact that she didn't know a lot about football except as a spectator, but audiences loved her. She would go to an NFL game and be talking to players and people would come up and want her autograph as opposed to the player, so she was with NFL today for seven years. A lot of people think Phyllis kind of set the women's movement back a little bit. Others, however, believed that just her visibility played a role in women having more opportunities and I fall in that camp. I really think she did help the cause. The next person, and she's pictured here too, is Jeannie Morris. She was the first woman to report from a Super Bowl. She was working full-time for Chicago Station and really made a name for herself. Audiences loved her and so the network decided that we should have her reporting from the Super Bowl in 1975. The problem is this was kind of a one-and-done thing and Jeannie was outside the stadium doing person on the street interviews and trying to play up, why as a woman are you here watching the Super Bowl? So that was not an auspicious start, but she was very, very successful on the local level. Andrea Kirby was also very successful on the local level and ABC decided to give her a shot on wide world of sports in 1977. She was there for a couple of years, but she felt that she wasn't really getting used the way she wanted to be. And so she actually, her contract wasn't renewed, but she actually started a new career for herself and she began mentoring and coaching athletes about how to talk to the media. The next person is Gail Gardner who probably was the first big star at ESPN as a sports center anchor in 1983. She was there for four years and was so well-liked and so successful that NBC came calling and she moved to NBC where she was for several years. She got to cover the Olympics and she also was the first person to do play-by-play for a major league baseball game. So she was quite a pioneer too. And then there's Leslie who became a sideline reporter in 1984 for CBS. Now the backdrop to all of this, I think that made it difficult for women to really move more quickly into the ranks of sports journalists and sports departments was the fact that they had no locker room access. Locker rooms professional especially were not open to women and so women sports writers would have to find creative ways to get interviews with the players after a game. Now some people will say, well, why do they need to go to the locker room anyway? And the point really is, well, if there were men were going to the locker room then obviously women had to be there too. So this timeline shows just how slow the progress was. Robin Herman was able to get the National Hockey League to open its locker room for the All-Star Game in 75 and then more access load from that. Jane Gross, who wrote for, well, a couple of New York newspapers was able to get the National Basketball Association to open up in the mid-70s. Major League Baseball was a little bit of a tougher nut to crack. The pivotal point was when Melissa Lutke, who was writing for Sports Illustrated, was barred from the New York Yankees locker room for the World Series in 1977. Sports Illustrated, because she had had access during the regular season, Sports Illustrated decided that they were going to sue on her behalf to get her access the following year. And the court ruled in her favor. However, the decision really only covered the New York Yankees, but the American League commissioner decided, well, we're gonna open up all the locker rooms in the American League. Obviously, if Melissa's covering the Yankees, they're going to go to other parks and other cities. So that helped. Not all of Major League Baseball was open to female reporters, though, until 1984. And that happened because Claire Smith, who's also pictured here, was thrown out of the San Diego Padres locker room during the World Series. The new commissioner of baseball the next day, because every other reporter wrote about the incident, the commissioner decided, enough of this, all of the locker rooms have to be open. But that wasn't until 1984. Now, in 1981, the National Football League, another tough nut to crack, decided to open their locker room because of Michelle Himmelberg, who's pictured on the left. Michelle had been writing for a newspaper in Florida and covering the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And the Buccaneers had decided they would put up a wall so that all of the reporters could be separate from the locker room and they could just usher players into it. But as you can imagine, the other reporters didn't like this arrangement at all. They called the wall the Himmelberg wall. So that really didn't do much for Michelle's career. When she moved though to San Francisco, the paper went to bat for her right away and the locker room was open and other NFL locker rooms followed from that. So the problem is just because the locker rooms were open didn't mean that they were welcoming places for women. In fact, the opposite was true. I think every woman from the early era will tell you that they had to put up with a ridiculous amount of harassment, some of its sexual harassment, just to do their job. And I think the first pioneers will tell you that their attitude was, well, we've got to just quietly let it go. Anybody who directs any comments at us, we can't let it get to us. We just have to show that we're here to do a job and that's that. Lisa Saxon, who's on the right with Vince Scully, the famous broadcaster of the Dodgers, she had a horrendous time in locker rooms in the 1980s. And she almost gave up a couple of times. That's why I liked this picture of her with Vince Scully because he was somebody who really mentored her and encouraged her and told her not to give up. And so she did persevere, even though terrible things happened to her. I mean, she would have jockstraps thrown at her, athletes would masturbate right in front of her. And again, she just tried to ignore it all and do her job. Things changed a lot in 1990 when Lisa Olsen endured a humiliating experience in the New England Patriots locker room. She was just in there doing her job when she was surrounded by players, not wearing anything. And later she described it as feeling like she was being raped mentally anyway. And she probably wouldn't have made a case about it except that the other newspapers in town wrote about it. And so she started getting asked questions and she decided she was gonna be honest about it and about how much, how ridiculous it was. And subsequently the NFL did an investigation and they corroborated most of what Lisa had told them. The players were fined, but I don't think the players actually ever paid their fines. And for Lisa, who sued the team and won a civil settlement, the harassment really didn't stop. I mean, it stopped in the locker room, but it didn't stop in the general public. The team's owner made really wise cracks about it anytime he was asked about it. And when she was going to cover other things, she might have beer thrown her in her head, her tires were slashed, people would come to her house. And it was just, it was total harassment and it got to the point where she really couldn't be a journalist in Boston anymore. And I think she felt she couldn't be a journalist anywhere. So she was working for the Boston Herald or Rupert Murdoch paper and she got herself transferred to a paper in Australia. I'm not sure exactly how long she stayed there, but that was a shame because Lisa really was a great writer and we missed her here in the States. The good thing and why it's a pivotal point, I think, is that other women, the ones who had really decided, like Lisa had Saxon had said, I've just got to put up with this and do my job, started speaking out and editors, fellow reporters, male colleagues also started speaking out and teams realized that this just wasn't gonna cut it, they were gonna have to do something about the harassment that was going on. So things really did start to change because of Lisa, Lisa Olson. Speaking of harassment, ESPN is widely seen as being a game changer for women in broadcasting. And it was, however, the first 10 years that the station was in existence in 1979 came into existence in 1979. Things were not good for women. I mean, ESPN was a startup, kind of like a Silicon Valley startup with a bunch of young guys who really felt like it was their fraternity house that they were living in and working in. And women did not fare well there. There really wasn't much of an HR presence. And so women didn't, their complaints were not taken seriously. Things changed though in probably the early 10 years later when a male announcer was suspended for three months because of complaints against him. Then ESPN started taking things seriously, beefed up its HR department, started punishing other people who were not falling in line and things got a lot better for women. But like I said, the ESPN was a game changer for women in sports journalism. And while Gail Gardner was their first star, the first actual sports center anchor was Rhonda Glenn. And I think she was a lot like Phyllis George in that she was somebody who wasn't gonna make waves or there wasn't gonna be a lot of negative response to her. But her thing was golf. She was actually quite a good golfer and she really loved writing about the golf tour. And so she left ESPN after a year and that's when Gail Gardner came in. As you can see from that ad, the station ESPN really wanted to make a star out of her because she was very well received because she was so articulate and could banter with Chris Berman who's pictured there in Greg Gumbel. So it was a fun show to watch. And I think a lot of women got the idea that they could be sports journalist, sports broadcasters because of Gail Gardner. Now, Robin Roberts, she was the first black sports center anchor. I think a lot of people don't realize how long Robin Roberts was in sports before she moved on to Good Morning America. And again, she had a lot of influence on women, a mentor to so many people. And I think her career, again, I think it gets overlooked, but it was a really important for women in sports journalism. Linda Cohn is the longest-tenured sports center anchor. She started there in 1992. I think it says a lot about ESPN that it is a woman who has been the longest-tenured anchor at ESPN. And she's still there going strong. Holly Rowe, sideline reporter, extraordinary there is still going strong. She's not just a sideline reporter. She hosts other programs. But if anybody watches any college basketball, they know who Holly is. Probably the last frontier for women in sports journalism is the play-by-play announcing the games. And that means either being the play-by-play announcer, the person who narrates the action as it's going on, or the color commentator, the analyst who puts things in context. Women have always aspired to this, but I think the audiences were the last to fall in line and decide that women could actually do this. A lot of complaints about women at first was the fact that their voices were grading. I just don't like listening to a woman. What does she know about sports? And so despite the fact that announcing is really incredibly difficult, the preparation that goes into it is amazing. I talked to a couple of play-by-play people who would do one game a week, but they would spend the whole previous week preparing for it, just like they were an athlete preparing for their Sunday afternoon game. The timeline of play-by-play people is interesting. Gail Sarians got the chance to do an NFL game in 1987. And she was actually very well received. But the network only gave her a six-game contract for the following year, and so she basically decided she couldn't quit her day job, which was as an anchor at a local station. So she went back to that. Leandra Riley, kind of the same thing. She did an NBA game in 1988, and Gail Gardner did a major league baseball game in 1993. But it wasn't until 2017 that another woman, Beth Mullins, got the chance to do an NFL game. And she had already made a name for herself with ESPN as a play-by-play person for college basketball and softball and baseball. And so she was well known. People were very confident that she would do a good job and be well received. And she has been well received for the most part, but there are still those Twitter trolls who just don't, who just really think that what does a woman know about sports? I don't really want to get my sports from a woman, which is I think something that I think sports announcers have just learned to put up with. I mean, as long as their employer thinks they're doing a good job, I guess that's all you can hope for. Hannah Storm and Andrea Kramer were hired to do Thursday night football games when Amazon Prime got the contract for that in 2018. And they've been doing it ever since. They are not the main feed. There still are two announcers who can be seen during the broadcast. And Hannah and Andrea are an alternate feed that people can click on on Amazon Prime and listen to. And although there really aren't a lot of statistics on how well they're doing, they obviously their contracts have been renewed. And what they're showing is, is that women can really can do the job. And so that's been a big boost for women. Kate Scott is the voice of the Philadelphia 76ers. And that's a real coup. I mean, if you are an announcer, I think the job security of covering a team, being the person on TV, who's narrating the action every single game for the entire season is really the pinnacle. And I know Kate feels that way that she's really, she's happy to be in Philadelphia and she's doing a great job. Lisa Hextal is doing NHL games for ESPN. And again, she's doing a good job. I don't know if she aspires to be the announcer for any one particular team, but I think she could probably do it. I think the most progress probably has been made in baseball. It's kind of like playing baseball. You start out in the minor leagues and then you move up from AA to AAA and then finally to the majors. And that has happened to a couple of women already. Melanie Newman is doing major league baseball games on Friday night for Apple Plus TV. So it really shows that things are changing. Now, color commentary is a whole, I think probably tougher to make or break into because a lot of networks hire ex-athletes to analyze the action. But Susan Waldman is the gold standard for color commentators. She's been doing New York Yankees games since 2005. Doris Burke, if anybody has ever watched an NBA game, they know who Doris Burke is. She's very well respected, not just by the fans, but by players and coaches. And Jessica Mendoza does major league baseball games, not on a regular basis, but actually pretty regularly during the week. One of the big challenges for women, I think is juggling their career with all the demands of the job. Now, I know all women in the workplace have to juggle their lives with the intensity of the job. But again, I think women sports journalists can lay claim to the fact that it's even tougher for them because not just the 24 seven nature of reporting on sports, but also the intensity of deadlines and the fact that management may not always understand your conflicting priorities. Murray Harden at Penn State University did a study a few years ago of 10, she followed 10 women who were just starting out in sports journals and careers. And by the five year mark, she found that five of them had quit. They had either just quit journalism or gone into the newsroom. And another, a sixth was thinking about it at the time. What Marie says happens to these women is that it isn't just one thing. The intensity of deadlines, maybe you can put up with that. But if you also have management who isn't in your corner, who isn't understanding what's happening, then you really feel out there and alone. I know that happened to Amber Theoharis during her career. She was covering the Baltimore Orioles for regional TV network. And she had a great situation. Management understood that she was, well, she was pregnant at the time and she actually had a difficult pregnancy and was out a lot longer than she had expected to be. But they were very understanding when she came back, she had her job back and that was great. When she moved to the NFL network, however, management wasn't so flexible. And when she came back, she had another child and when she came back from that maternity leave, she found that she'd been replaced. She had been a program host and she was no longer doing that. So she basically left the NFL network soon after that just because she knew that she really wasn't gonna get the support she needed to be a mother. Jackie McMullen faced some issues too. I think she would probably tell you some of them were self-inflicted because her management at the Boston Globe was very understanding of the fact that she was a new mom. However, the job was so intense, she covered the NBA, not just the Boston Celtics, but during the NBA finals, she had to spend weeks on the road. I think it was the Phoenix Suns and the Chicago Bulls. The year that things really came to a head, she had kind of hoped that the Chicago Bulls would wrap up the series and she could fly home to be with her kids who are obviously now all grown up. But that didn't happen. The Phoenix Suns actually pulled the upset and so she had to go back to Chicago and wait around for two days, or she would have had to go back to Chicago and wait around for two days for the next game. She decided she couldn't do it. She hopped on a red eye and came back to Boston and figured she was gonna get fired, but she didn't. And they worked things out, which is ideal. I mean, men and women, both sports writers should have those kinds of relationships with their managers just so they can have a life. I think that's important. And Jackie certainly had a lot to do actually with things changing in that regard, but it's tough. And I think, again, that five year mark is gonna tell you whether or not you can really make it and for various reasons, stay in the profession. Marie Hardin also teaches journalism classes at Penn State. And when women come in and ask her, should I go into journalism? She always says, yes, do it. See if you can get it done and see if you can make a career of it. The last chapter of my book is about the future and again, I think there are some special challenges for women who wanna go into sports journalism. I think the first one is the one I like to call the incredible shrinking sports hole. I mean, anybody who's picked up a newspaper, a physical newspaper will tell you that there isn't a lot to it these days. Adds, because the ads are shrinking and everybody's going online. Smaller newspapers, especially where women used to get their start, have really cut back on their staffs. You'll see in these smaller markets, a lot of sharing of content by other newspapers in the area. And again, there just isn't a lot of opportunity. If there's more than one woman in the sports department at a paper with a circulation under a hundred thousand, that's really something. The other problem for young women I think is that even if they do get hired, they're usually facing the fact that they may not last. I know the pandemic, even ESPN laid off a lot of people. And even if there isn't a union in the building, a lot of times management, if you were the last one hired, you'll be the first one to be laid off. So I think because of some of these reasons, it probably isn't surprising, shocking. I mean, it's shocking, but it isn't surprising that only 15% of sports reporters are women. And that was in a 2021 Associated Press Sports Editor Survey. And women still only produce 10% of sports content, which is obviously not very much. But of course, there's always hope for the future. And like Marie Hardin says, if you wanna go into journalism, then do it. Because you will find a way. Networking and mentoring support has increased a lot. A lot of it is thanks to the Association for Women in Sports Media, which has been around since 1999, but has really stepped up its mentoring programs. There are a lot of awesome, as it's called, awesome chapters on college campuses. And networking is just a great way to get your foot in the door of some media outlet. I think increased coverage of women sports has provided more opportunities for women. I know there's one woman who was laid off by the Boston Herald. She bounced around for a while. And then finally, the San Francisco Chronicle hired her recently to, and they made a beat out of covering women sports. So that's all she does because the paper has realized that there's a lot of interest in women sports. And we need somebody devoted to that. Another hopeful thing is that media outlets have committed themselves to diversity initiatives. ESPN and a lot of ESPN's initiative has to do with complaints from minorities, people of color and women who feel like they are kind of stuck in place and not getting the opportunities they should. So ESPN has committed to diversifying its efforts even more. Gannett newspapers have made a pledge to have all of their, not just sports, but newsrooms reflect their communities by 2025. So what that means is if 50% of the population or the circulation area is people of color, then the newspaper, the whole paper has to reflect that. Maybe the most important, I want to wield a camera. You have to know how to keep track of things on Twitter. And again, podcasting is a way to make a name for yourself. Making your own films and sending them out is also a good way. So there are opportunities and certainly, women still can become sports journalists today. In a way, the young women today are very much like the women, the first pioneers. I mean, in many ways, they have to be tenacious. They have to be confident in themselves. They obviously have to be passionate about what they do and optimistic about the fact that they can make a go of it. And they have to be willing to hurdle the new obstacles that are in front of them. And if they love sports as much as the pioneers do, then they'll be able to do that, I think. One thing I haven't really talked about at all is the fact that in my book, what I decided to try to do was to break out profiles of certain women that I think have been very important in the whole history of women in sports journalism. Mary Garber obviously was the first, but I also profiled Claire Smith because Claire was probably the first female, full-time baseball writer, which meant that she got to write about baseball nationally. So when, for example, when Barry Barnes was going through all that trouble with steroids and she was the only person that he would actually talk to. And that didn't mean she wrote positive columns about him. She actually wrote some kind of negative stuff about him, but she was very, very well respected. She ended up, she went from the Hartford Quarant to the Philadelphia Inquirer, and she is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame, the first woman to be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a writer. Pam Oliver is another person I profiled. She was a broad, she still is a broadcaster for the Fox Network, she's gonna be getting the Mary Garber Pioneer Award this year because her career has spanned several decades. She started out in a local market and made her way to Fox where she's been a really well-received sideline reporter for a number of years. Robin Roberts, I've already talked about a little bit, but she certainly is somebody that has, she had a 15-year career as a sports journalist, and faced a lot of hurdles and stereotypes that she actually wrote her own book about her time as a sports journalist. And so I think a lot of people, like I said before, didn't really know that she had such a great career in sports. And I think that Dara is a great writer, Doris Burke probably deserves a chapter of her own just because of what she's done for women in the announcing field. She's not somebody who really, she has done some play-by-play, but she's not somebody who really ever aspired to play-by-play, but she was, she's really singular in terms of her expertise in analyzing basketball games. And like I said before, she gets so much respect, not just from players, but also coaches. And even though she does have some critics, I think a lot of her audiences, because she's so well-respected by everybody else, that they've kind of come to accept her. And so she's done a lot for women in that segment of sports journalism. That kind of wraps up what I came to talk about today. I do really appreciate the opportunity to talk about women in sports journalism. I think it's an important topic. And I think that like I say in this last slide, there certainly is hope for the future. There's a lot of women growing up today playing sports and thinking about the fact that maybe this is something they can do. They don't have to give it up. They can continue to fuel their passion for sports by writing about it or being on TV or podcasting or whatever else.