Abstract
This study investigates the specificity of women sports journalists’ writing in the context of the French-speaking Swiss daily press. By analysing their working practices (observations and interviews) and their output (content analysis), it shows that women sports journalists do not adopt the customary professional norms of this journalistic speciality. Their ‘feminine’ writing is characterized by an interest in soft news and ‘human’ perspective which is different from the usual treatment of sports news, focused on facts and technical analysis, developed by the large majority of their male colleagues. It takes place within structural mechanisms – particularly modes of recruitment, gender division of labour, the acknowledgement of skills and the organizational mechanisms within sports newsrooms – as well as daily interactions in the workplace and the taste of women journalists. Women journalists employ a subversive strategy and play with the stereotypical images of their professional competences. However, the way they exercise their profession contributes to the definition of masculine and feminine journalistic values and practices and to the maintenance of the existing gender order in sports journalism.
As in most western societies, the number of women active in journalism in Switzerland has risen steeply over the last three decades (Chambers et al., 2004; Gallagher 2001; Neveu, 2000; Van Zoonen, 1994). In the French-speaking part of Switzerland that is the focus of our research, the number of women in journalism has risen from 17% at the start of the 1980s (Marr, 2003) to 36% in 2008 (Bonfadelli et al., 2011). Women gained access to the speciality of sports journalism later on, however. It was only from 2000 on that women began to swell the ranks in sports newsrooms in the French-speaking Swiss daily press where before there was but a single pioneer, yet this is later than in other developed countries such as the United States (Creedon, 1993). Today, sports journalism still has the fewest women when compared to other sections of the dailies: of the 61 sports journalists, only 13% are women and half of the sports newsrooms are exclusively run by men. Like in the British or US press where women constitute respectively about 9% and 13% of the sports journalists (Boyle, 2006; Hardin and Shain, 2005), sports journalism remains a traditionally male journalistic arena in Switzerland, despite the increasing participation of women in sports.
By examining the modalities of this significant increase in the number of women active in the sports columns of the Swiss-French press, we have shown that their recruitment is generally the result of particular editorial decisions (Schoch and Ohl, 2011). Editors-in-chief seem to think that women are predisposed to treat news differently from men. They assume that women have ‘another, a different outlook on sport’ (interview with Aurélie) which leads them to write sports journalism that is focused on the emotional and human aspects, and which can bring in a new readership that is less familiar with sport. This way of considering women journalists is not unique to Switzerland and Chambers et al. (2004: 33) also observed that: ‘In both the US and Britain, women journalists were expected to be “different” from their male colleagues in both what they wrote and the way they wrote it.’ The idea of gender or minority quotas at work does not exist in Switzerland, although a federal equality-oriented article was added to the Swiss Constitution in 1981 and the Swiss legislation does not include a similar law to the USA’s Title IX. Therefore, women’s increasing participation in the Swiss labour force is not due to political requirements, including in the media field. Thus, although other rationales could be at play, notably marketing (promoting the ‘right image’ of the paper) and ethical (encouraging the presence of women and favouring a more balanced treatment of news), the desire to give space to ‘feminine’ writing in sports journalism largely explains the feminization of the profession over the last ten years.
The goal of this article is to question the presupposition that determines this recruitment of women into sports journalism and to see whether such ‘feminine’ writing – as found at least among some of the women journalists – really does currently exist in French-speaking Swiss sports journalism. With the aim of deconstructing the essentialist vision underpinning the employment of women in sports journalism and which presupposes that men and women have a naturally different ‘approach’ to sport and a different way of handling sports news, we propose to examine whether a woman’s way of writing, selecting and treating sports news is really different from that of her male colleagues. In which way(s)? To what extent? By dynamically analysing the sociography, position within sports journalism, professional practices and journalistic output of women sports journalists in the French-speaking Swiss press, we will try to understand the logics that explain the ways they deal with news (the diversity and ambivalence of which will also be questioned), and particularly the effects of gender, understood as the power relations between the sexes and the construction at the heart of sports journalism of values that are differentiated and hierarchized around a masculine/feminine divide.
Literature review
Most of the studies on sports journalism have been conducted by scholars engaged in the broader field of sports media research (e.g. Blain and O’Donnell, 1998; Boyle, 2006; Rowe, 1999, 2005, 2007; Whannel, 1992). Many studies focusing on different aspects of sports journalism and writing have emphasized the impact of the gendered profile of the profession on sports news regarding the key role sports journalists play as cultural producers of media texts. However, as we will illustrate later, most of the research on the role of women in sport and the media has focused on the representation of women in sporting discourse; in addition the question of the impact of gender on journalistic writing – on which this study will rely – remains globally under-researched in sports journalism when compared to other areas of journalism where studies are more numerous.
Questioning the possibility of a specifically feminine journalistic output requires, on the one hand, that one ask oneself if women journalists select different kinds of news than their male counterparts. Several studies have shown that women journalists have a greater propensity to treat themes thought of as ‘feminine’, such as health, education and family, since these conform to the social roles of women. This is true as much for the distribution of men and women within different sections as it is for the distribution of subjects within a single section (e.g. Djerf-Pierre, 2007 in the case of Sweden; Damian-Gaillard and Saitta, 2011 in the case of France). Women appear also to be more inclined to select other women as sources (Zoch and VanSlyke Turk, 1998) and to have different relations with them than male journalists, especially in the field of masculine journalistic specialities (Lachover, 2005) such as sport (Schoch, 2013), which in turn could broadly influence the news that is gathered.
On the other hand, examining a specifically feminine journalistic output is also to ask whether women journalists treat news in an original way. Christmas (1997) and Gill (2007) have observed that British and Dutch female journalists respectively are more guided by human aspects and less by results than their male colleagues. In the Netherlands, the works of Van Zoonen (1994, 1998) indicate that women attach more importance to the causes and impact of facts. In the French dailies, Neveu (2000) records the affinity women have, first with an ethnographic approach to journalism, comparable to the influence of American New Journalism (Wolfe, 1996), second, with a psychological and emotional treatment of news which is close to Intimate Journalism (Harrington, 1997) and, last, with the practical information that is part of everyday life.
Thus, in a research field that is still under construction, several studies already point to a gender-influenced approach to the selection and treatment of news. They tend to indicate that, in order to understand these gender inflections in the treatment of news, an analysis of journalistic output is required that takes the working conditions of journalists into account. Indeed, if the writing deployed by women journalists can partially be linked to feminine dispositions, notably because of the effects of their primary socialization, it also seems to be related to professional socialization and work relations (Neveu, 2000). Van Zoonen (1998) has notably pointed out the different expectations of men and women journalists – whereby certain aspects of journalistic practice are perceived as gendered, and where feminine and masculine journalistic values exist – which influence the practices of men and women journalists. This might lead women to be confined more easily to a supposedly ‘feminine’ form of journalism (Chambers et al., 2004).
As it happens, studies of the effects of the context of news production on the content of news from a gender perspective remain relatively rare and none deal with sports journalism. On the one hand, as mentioned previously, various researchers have analysed the media content dealing with sport from the viewpoint of gender. The gender bias in the media treatment of sport and differences in how male and female athletes are represented have been exposed by various studies but the modes of production of these media texts have not been analysed precisely (e.g. Duncan et al., 2000; Eastman and Billings, 2000). On the other hand, fewer studies have been carried out on the ways women journalists produce sports news (e.g. Claringbould et al., 2004; Cramer, 1994; Staurowsky and DiManno, 2002). They focus on their professional experiences (particularly showing that women have to battle for acceptance in the face of prejudice and hostility) and careers but do not analyse their journalistic output. For example, Hardin and Shain (2005, 2006), one of the key references on this topic, show that women sports journalists have a different relation to their sources than their male counterparts and see themselves as bringing something different to their columns by virtue of being women; the authors do not analyse the texts produced, however, and cannot therefore verify whether this is actually the case. Yet sports journalism – which is a rather masculine speciality within journalism and where the integration of women is often linked to specific expectations from editors, as is the case in French-speaking Switzerland – seems an eminently privileged domain for analysing the question of the gender-inflected treatment of news.
Field and methods
Switzerland is a small multicultural country with international ties but also a strong national and regional media landscape. It is divided into three language regions (French-, Italian- and German-speaking) to which correspond three regional media markets. The country lacks a truly national media. Historically, the federal structure of the country has favoured a high number of relatively small local or regional media products. This explains its diversity in media: at the level of the print media it has the most paid-for dailies (14) per million inhabitants of any European country (REMP, 2008). The 14 French-Swiss newspapers, all of which have a sports section, are resisting the process of concentration. There is no exclusive sports newspaper. With the exception of Le Matin and Le Temps, all the newspapers have a regional distribution. They adopt a local editorial line and no precise political positioning, and cannot be strictly classified as cultural or as popular compared with what we observe in other nearby countries (Marchetti, 2005).
This research draws on two complementary sets of data. First, in order to encompass the professional grouping of sports journalists (professional careers, practices, values, etc.), we gathered field notes by adopting the role of ‘participant-as-observer’ (Junker, 1960), working on the sports sections of two Swiss dailies (24 Heures and Le Temps). We also conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with sports journalists (12 women, 13 men) between January 2008 and March 2009. This sample corresponds to roughly 40% of the research population. Lasting on average 80 minutes, the interviews were recorded and integrally transcribed with the permission of the interviewees. In order to preserve anonymity the names and any clues to identification have been changed or omitted, including the names of the papers themselves.
Second, our study is based on the analysis of a corpus of press articles. We analysed every signed sports article (unsigned articles based on news agency reports have not been taken into account) published over a period of six months (from 5 January to 20 June 2009) by four dailies chosen as representative of the diversity of the French-speaking Swiss press: Le Matin, a popular newspaper which is the reference in sports information; Le Temps, the only broadsheet newspaper, and the two most important regional newspapers: La Liberté and 24 Heures (in this way, we analysed the production of the two newspapers where we made field observations). We conducted a quantitative analysis of these 4817 articles by means of statistical software. This allowed us to draw up a ‘journalistic profile’ for the different sports editors, of whom six were women, which reveal the kinds of sports news they treated – sport(s), type(s) of news, etc. – and the ways in which they treated it: type of article (story, portrait, interview, etc.), the vocabulary used, etc. Some articles that were particularly representative of a woman journalist’s style were analysed qualitatively (they have been spotted during the coding). Taking into account the syntax, the wordplay used, the lexicon and the choices of scene used in these articles, we effected a sociological discourse analysis (Esquenazi, 2002).
Developing a ‘feminine’ approach to sport
Turning away from desired subjects
With the exception of Anna (whose profile will be presented later), all the female sports journalists we interviewed said they wished to distance themselves as much as possible from the professional norms as defined and propagated by male journalists. 1 This is effectively borne out already by the way they selected sports news; 73% of the articles of the corpus are devoted to seven major sports, the majority of which are largely masculine: football and ice hockey (clearly privileged by the newspapers with respectively 22% and 20% of the articles), alpine skiing, tennis, basketball, racing and cycling. The output of the male journalists is mostly concerned with these seven sports (84% of their articles), which are the most prestigious, the most-read and the most relevant for sales figures. Being in charge of these sports, 2 and especially football and ice hockey, is one of the surest investments possible with respect to access to positions of power in journalism. Female journalists are more concerned with sports that are considered as secondary and are equally more feminized: 18% of their articles, for example, are devoted to volleyball and 9% to sailing (only 1% of male output deals with each of these sports). Excluding Anna’s output, only 1% of the articles concerning football and ice hockey respectively were written by women.
The sports with the highest reputation thus seem to be the exclusive purview of male journalists. Yet women are not completely excluded from them and several of them are interested in skiing and cycling, for example (respectively 17% and 10% of the ‘feminine’ output). They are also occasionally called upon to cover certain major sports, when covering for a colleague or avoiding the necessity of calling on a freelance journalist. Moreover, as they are considered to have the writing skills proper to magazine-style journalism, they are sometimes asked by their editor-in-chief to write a ‘magazine’ article (that is not linked to a hot topic, has a wide angle, a ‘colourful’ treatment and provides a pleasant reading experience) or a survey on these sports: ‘I covered violence in football, a survey and things like that’ (interview with Mireille). In turn, they almost never do the technical-tactical reports on these sports, especially football and ice hockey, as these constitute the most prestigious pieces of journalism, which would ask the women a high symbolic price.
This horizontal segregation at the centre of sports journalism in part results from the personal choices of women, who have affinities with sports that are mixed and/or feminine, which in turn could be the result of their socially constructed feminine dispositions (Bourdieu, 1993). It is also the result of assignments given by editors-in-chief on the basis of gender stereotypes, allocating sports that are traditionally masculine, especially football and ice hockey, to men and sports that are mixed or more feminine to women. More often than not the allocation of sub-specialities to journalists is due to the section head. All the sports section heads are men and occupying positions of power allows men, through process of cooptation similar to those observed by Melin-Higgins (2004), to keep the most coveted sports to themselves and assign women to secondary sports. Lastly, a form of ‘symbolic violence’ – understood as ‘the subtle imposition of systems of meaning that legitimize and thus solidify structures of inequality’ (Wacquant, 1998: 217) – reigns over women journalists and leads them, for the most part, to renounce the ‘noble’ part of their profession of their own accord in order to avoid competing with their colleagues: ‘Moreover, it went well with the other journalists, they did not resent me. I wasn’t the one stealing their job, far from it. I had my own stuff alongside, so it was perfect’ (interview with Aurélie).
Treating ‘sports news’ as just ‘news’
According to the professional standards of sports journalism, validated by male journalists, a ‘good’ sports article has to meet four criteria. First, it has to include a technical and tactical analysis: this relatively factual approach has the aim of making the reader understand the development of a fixture, how the scoring progressed, the key moments in the match, who was penalized by the referee, the injuries, etc. This generally requires a technical vocabulary proper to the sport: ‘Our colleagues who correct and re-read us often come back to us saying they did not understand a term but it must have been sport-related’ (interview with Frédéric). Second, as expert, the journalist has to comment on the event, meaning he or she has to take a position, evaluate and judge the performance or lack of it. Michel explains it thus: ‘We work for a paper which states it has no bias. This is always difficult in the sports section, because when you see a match and you write about it in detail in your article you have to take a position, you cannot get out of it.’
Third, a sports article gains in value when it shows the journalist was there in person. This is considered as the very essence of the job as it allows the journalist to take part in the event, to mingle with the players and to share in the locker room moments after the match. Michel says:
You should have the smell of fried sausages in your nostrils. You should be able to feel the thick grass. You should see the smoke of the torches and be able to hear. It is complicated. It is everything together.
It also allows the journalist to get interviews, extracts from which, beyond the staging of being in the thick of it, add value to the article. Lastly, a ‘good’ sports article must contain a trace of the journalist’s own passion for sport. This has always been a job requirement (Schoch and Ohl, in press) because it guarantees that the journalist knows his or her stuff and is able to write solid articles that reflect the emotions on the field. As Henri says: ‘You have to be passionate. I believe you cannot possibly write a match report if you are not crazy about a sport.’
The match report is the one article that allows all four principles to be used to the full. Considered in the profession as the most worthwhile, it attracts the most attention from male journalists, 44% of whose articles are devoted to it. Our data are consistent with the International Sports Press Survey 2005 (Play the Game, 2005), which observes that previewing and descriptive reporting of sport events dominate sports journalism all over the world. For women journalists, however, reports only makes up 26% of their articles. They seem to privilege other types of article, notably the portrait (20% of their output) and investigation (17% of their output, where male colleagues only give 6% of their output to this kind of article; see Figure 1).
Types of articles written by male and female journalists.
Tone of the articles by male and female journalists.
Moreover, women tend not to use a technical approach which they seem to appreciate less and they sometimes criticize their colleagues for using it too often: ‘But when he wrote it was always he and he doing so many metres and then blah blah blah. Hyper technical’ (interview with Aurélie). They prefer to develop a story or adopt a scientific style. 3
The kinds of article and approach adopted by women journalists are more favourable to developing angles other than the strictly sport-related. This shows their wish to move away from the style adopted as a point of reference by their male colleagues. Seeing journalism as a vocation, they have entered the field of sport by taking advantage of recruitment conditions favourable to women but without being specifically attracted to this journalistic speciality, which they had also never worked in before for the most part. 4 Our analyses have shown that, strongly inspired by their university and professional training in non-sports journalism, 5 they do not tend to stick to the particular values of this journalistic field.
First, the athletic performance is not a central element in many articles written by women, who tend to privilege the ‘human’ aspects more. Often borrowing an ethnographic viewpoint, they go out to meet the athletes and talk about non-sporting factors in their articles, thereby showing their interest in the ‘person behind the shirt’ (interview with Kathy). This is how Aurélie begins one of her articles (published on 14 December 2008) like that: ‘He came to Geneva driving his own lorry. He will go back again the same way, in perfect simplicity. He being Trevor Coyle, the winner of the Grand Prix world cup …’ Whereas their male colleagues tend to go for the spectacle and to interview athletes, coaches and administrators who tend to be drawn from the ranks of celebrities (their Australian counterparts tend to do the same according to Rowe, 2007), these female journalists do not mind working on reports of less apparent significance that allow them to meet ordinary people. During the 2009 Ice Hockey World Cup held in Switzerland, for example, Léa devoted an article (published on 2 May 2009) to the Latvians who came to support their national team. While underlining the strong nationalist sentiments in play for this newly participating country, which was only freed from the Soviet yoke 20 years before, the journalist gradually goes on to discover more about the lives of these people:
They invoke the wish to be close to the mountains in this incredible country, like Aija for example, who gets up at seven every morning to contemplate them in the distance. Their modesty forbids them to speak of the journey which cost an arm and a leg.
Let us give their first names – ‘Aija’, ‘Juris’, ‘Kaspars’ – and their occupations – ‘neuro-surgeon’, ‘director of a hospital’, ‘housewife’. She describes her interlocutors in some detail thus allowing the reader to conjure them up: ‘A captain’s cap, a low-cut garnet-red, braided dress leaving the legs uncovered, scarlet slippers, a shamelessly red lipstick, this 29-year-old mother has been following the team with her husband for ten years.’ Along the lines of this article, women journalists like to write, when possible, a ‘slice of life’ kind of journalism that is close to ordinary people, and to bring in stories. They devote many of their articles to the sideshows of sporting events and only rarely to the sporting achievements themselves. This way of doing sports journalism is close in many respects to the American New Journalism (Wolfe, 1996). Neveu (2000) makes a similar statement when analysing the work of female political journalists in the French press.
Second, women journalists frequently take a psychology-oriented approach (10% of their articles) and adopt a relatively intimate tone in their articles. Sandrine’s article, entitled ‘The art of sailing from a woman’s point of view’ (published on 6 June 2009), is a good example. It concerns a soft news story: the presentation of an ‘all-women crew’ during a regatta training. Its sub-question, the management of communication between women on a boat, derives from a psychological register. It leads the journalist to describe the management of sensitivities, talking about the ‘piggybank system into which girls have to pay five Francs each time they cannot control their bad moods’. Borrowing a narrative style, the journalist reveals the personalities of the sportswomen: she describes the ‘young women whose characters were as sturdy as their oilskins’, mentions Karine and her ‘sometimes tempestuous moods’, ‘the young Manu’, who had to learn to assert herself or Dona, the most ‘maternal who keeps a close watch and soothes the group in times of tension’. Like this article – whose subject, problematic, narrative style and nuanced description of the personalities of the actors lend it a psychological dimension – numerous articles by female journalists adopt a relatively intimate and unusual form of sports journalism.
In this way one can pin-point a ‘feminine’ type of writing, both in terms of the selection of news and its treatment – and in the sense of a kind of writing developed by a majority of women working as sports journalists and which is different from that of the majority of male sports journalists – operative at the very heart of the sports journalism of the French-speaking Swiss dailies. Nonetheless, each female journalist has to face economic, organizational and editorial circumstances of their own. Moreover, the work constraints (relation to sources, particular instructions), the length of article or deadlines can, according to the position women hold in the sports newsroom, vary and thus force them more or less often into a more traditional style. The ways in which these women practise sports journalism are numerous and the ‘feminine’ style observed is therefore neither uniform nor systematic.
A professional stance built between constraints and opportunities
The market position and the editorial line of the newspapers deeply shape women journalists’ experiences of work. First, the difference in the style and tone used by women and male journalists is quite important within Le Matin and the regional newspapers, which promote a classical treatment of sports news that incorporates the four criteria previously described. The equivalent style and tone is looser within the daily broadsheet Le Temps, which encourages a less sport-oriented approach to sports news. This influences the integration of women journalists into the sports desks (Schoch and Ohl, 2011). Second, women’s degree of autonomy seems slightly greater in Le Temps, which allows them a little more space to cultivate their own style than the other newspapers, where a more prescriptive news agenda can be observed (Boyle, 2006: 153 makes a similar statement regarding the British press). Nonetheless, regardless of their professional situation, the writing women develop results from multiple mechanisms. First, it betrays the power relations in play in editorial offices: developing an unconventional style allows women reporters to gain legitimacy by proving what they can bring to sports writing as women while avoiding any competition with their colleagues. Nonetheless, though the articles written by women can broaden the scope of the section and eventually draw in new readers, they are still of less value than the conventional articles mostly written by male journalists. These latter are in control of the ranking of subjects deemed worthy of interest and the ways of treating them according to values that are far from the ones most women subscribe to. A sports-centred approach to sports news is the dominant form in sports journalism, and the style developed by women, consisting of portraits, interviews and more ‘human’ angles, is relegated to a lower level, thus limiting their internal and external professional recognition and compromising their access to positions of power.
Second, ‘feminine’ writing results from recruitment procedures and the allocation of tasks within the sports sections. If these women are interested in what lies beyond the athletic performance, it is in part because they are journalists rather than specialists in sport and they do not always have the requisite knowledge to write a conventional report on an event. Aurélie explains:
There was nobody for the sailing. So […] I was asked if I could do it. I said yes I would love to but that sailing was incredibly complicated because there is a huge technical vocabulary and things to know. Sailing is tough. Then I said to myself as they offered me a fresh angle I thought OK. I will do sailing but I won’t be talking about technique, I will talk about the people, I will ask them questions, I will write about them instead.
In their battle for survival these women draw on a more general knowledge and professional competence, one less specific to sports journalism, and this explains their distance from a strictly sports-centred approach. To be in charge of secondary sports, where strict sports reports are not necessarily expected by readers, makes it easier to take a step back from the professional norms. Nevertheless, the use of innovative journalistic techniques and practices can have different logics: if using interviews can sometimes plug a gap, it can also be utilized, according to reporter and situation, to create a new style, to let the actors speak for themselves and be as close as possible to them. The reporting style observed in women journalists can therefore refer to different practices with divergent meanings.
Third, the non-traditional style developed by women journalists derives from the constraining positions they occupy within the profession. The majority know that their recruitment was facilitated because they were women and the editorial board wanted a place for more ‘feminine’ writing. There is no doubt that this expectation on the part of their superiors weighs on the choice of subject and the manner of treating it, as evidenced by Aurélie:
The only thing I said to myself is that perhaps they appreciated what I wrote and my way of writing it and they wanted to keep me. There was a vacancy in sports and they thought may be she can hack it.
The instrumentalization of supposedly ‘feminine’ predispositions by editors-in-chief, particularly deployed at times of recruitment, weighs on the journalistic practices of women and seems to be interiorized in some ways by interviewees. Regularly invoking a specifically feminine instinct and sensibility, female reporters tend in effect to claim that their approach to sports writing derives from their ‘feminine nature’, from their ‘feminine’ relation to the world which is harnessed for the benefit of their journalistic work.
Lastly, the taste of women journalists also influences their journalistic practices, as Emilie says:
They [her editors-in-chief] wanted ambience, and I did ambience. But I always tried to put in some personal things too. Because saying that yesterday there was such and such a race and this one won and that one came second, etc., that did not interest me. So I always tried to insert a small personal element.
Differences in socialization, at the level of family, sport or professionally, can at least in part account for the differences in taste and sensibility between male and female reporters (Bourdieu, 1984) that affect their treatment of sports news. For example, although all the journalists share an inherent practical sporting culture linked to their own sporting activities, only men share strong socializing experiences as peers which are linked to their shared culture as spectators or even supporters. Thus Mireille, who seems to have a greater experience of sport as competition than her colleagues, considers that her own sporting life allows her to bring a certain depth to her articles, whereas her male colleagues draw more on their experience as spectators and are more inclined to describe facts descriptively and encyclopaedically:
The men I have seen are much more busy with digging out statistics, years, names and stuff. In my opinion that is typical of people who have never done any sport themselves, who have no personal experience of it. They do not know what it feels like to be at matchpoint 40–0 down against a guy who was ranked below you. They don’t know what it means to be in that position. They do not have the make-up of a sports person.
Thus sport socializations can also explain differences in journalistic treatment between men and women.
Writing like one’s male colleagues
Anna is ‘one of the boys’ (Van Zoonen, 1998) and exercises the profession of sports journalist like her male colleagues. This is neither a rational choice nor a professional strategy on the part of this pioneering woman who integrated herself into sports journalism in the 1980s. Anna, a former high-level hockey player, experienced ‘inverted socialisation’ (Mennesson, 2004) and does not behave according to gender-role expectations. Her ways of dressing, her attitudes and even her language are in tune with her male work environment, and sometimes she is stigmatized for her lack of femininity by her colleagues. Speaking of her, Mireille says: ‘My colleagues are always saying: “Yes, but she is a man!” because she is not very feminine and my colleagues really think of her as a man.’
Anna has exploited her experiences in sport and has succeeded in specializing in ice hockey. She seems to use field journalism techniques that are close to those of her male colleagues, as Emilie says: ‘I met one woman […] when I did my internship, she covered the hockey. But she was very masculine, it was.… And I followed her to matches. It wasn’t all that different from a guy.’ This woman journalist also writes texts that are wholly similar to those of male reporters. She devotes more than half her articles to match reports (53%). She uses a technical vocabulary in 30% of her texts, which is very close to the figure noted for her male colleagues (37%) and superior to that seen in other female reporters (20%). Anna’s productions only rarely touch on psychology, the economy or history (7% of her texts), whereas 15% of her male colleagues’ texts and 50% of her female colleagues’ texts do so. Finally we note that more than 8% of her articles concern announcements of transfers (less than 1% of her female colleagues articles cover this aspect), which is a sign of her adjustment to the dominant culture in sports journalism, which gives great importance to this kind of information. These several choices indicate that Anna primarily addresses a public composed of sports specialists, something perfectly illustrated by the following extract from an ice hockey match report she wrote (published on 25 March 2009):
The Dragons began a damage-limitation exercise and even equalized. Leonardo Genoni let slip an easy shot of Marc Abpanalp.… At half-time, Petr Sykova put the Davosians in the lead. The Fribourgers did not take advantage of a double fault by Ambrühl and Caron performed his magic in front of Taticek (39th minute). The tension mounted. The skilful equalizer from Julien Sprunger less than 13 minutes before injury time really hurt the Grisons. Yet, deprived of their star passer Bykov, the great attacker of the Dragons succeeded last night in scoring his first points in a semi-final: an assist and a goal on a pass by Plüss after having stood up to Forster. Hats off.
Strongly descriptive, this report offers a sports-technical analysis of the game: she analyses the errors that tip the match and comments on the play of each team, many times detailing the players and using a technical and specific vocabulary. As in this extract, Anna’s articles are true to the conventional style as defined by male journalists. Moreover, the analysis of her output (kinds of article, viewpoints, vocabulary, etc.) shows that she follows the professional rules scrupulously. Also seen in women engineers (Marry, 2004) and politicians (Achin, 2005), this type of super-conformity to the dominant professional culture demonstrates the dominance of the male order in sports journalism and shows that Anna feels compelled to mask her status as a woman, even though she was socialized in the sport culture (through her own sporting and professional experience) and shares the professional values of sport.
Discussion and conclusions
Our study, which is one of the few to investigate the specificity of women journalists’ writing – in our case, on sport – by analysing both their working practices and their output, shows that there is a ‘feminine’ type of writing in Swiss-French sports journalism. With the exception of Anna, a pioneer who exercises her profession in a similar way to male journalists, female sports journalists do not adopt the professional values and conventions of sports journalism. They develop an approach to sports news that is characterized by an interest in soft news and a psychological and ‘human’ perspective which is different from the usual treatment of sports news focused on facts and technical analysis. Thus, if Boyle (2006) and Hardin and Shain (2006) observed that women journalists feel that they can bring insight into the emotional aspects of the sport, our study reveals that it is effectively the case in the Swiss press.
This ‘feminine’ writing takes place within structural mechanisms – particularly modes of recruitment, gender division of labour, the acknowledgement of skills and the organizational mechanisms within sports newsrooms – as well as daily interactions with colleagues and the editor-in-chief which all contribute to asserting the dominance of the male order. This is also due to the taste of women journalists, which, especially in combination with their career path prior to entering the field of sport, bear little relation to the customary professional values of this journalistic speciality. Gender thus appears to be a decisive factor in the working relations of sports sections. It determines the negotiations of the professional roles of women journalists and the writing they deploy. At the same time, each woman reporter does her job within a network of constraints and opportunities unique to her, where her position within the section, her marital status and the presence of children also play an important role. This can sometimes force her to develop a more conventional style. In this way the ‘feminine’ writing seen in Swiss-French sports journalism is relatively heterogeneous.
This ‘feminine’ writing gives professional satisfaction to women journalists. Far from giving them a feeling of precariousness, their somewhat peripheral position in sports journalism (the style developed by men remaining dominant) gives them a certain feeling of autonomy. ‘Oh no, I have complete freedom this way. But that is also because it suits [my male colleagues]. That way they do not feel forced to take an interest in those sports. It really frees them up’ (interview with Mireille). Without denying the processes of domination, our analysis suggests the lucidity with which these women live their profession, in diverse but generally positive ways. Thus, whereas one would not have been surprised if sports journalism were just a stepping stone in their further career or desire to work in other specialities, or if they were to leave journalism altogether (as their American counterparts, analysed by Hardin and Shain [2006] tend to do), all the interviewees said, just like Mireille, that they would like to continue their careers in sports journalism:
But it is true that if I were assigned to another section now I would find it very hard, because sport is very interesting and I would never have realized it without working in it.… Yes, I would really like to stay with sports journalism.
It seems that women journalists employ a subversive strategy while placed in an inferior position. They play with the stereotypical images of their professional competences and turn the assignment based on traditional gender roles they are subjected to around. The fact that the recruitment of women sports journalists is a recent development, and is strongly underpinned by the vulnerable economic situation in which the Swiss press finds itself, encourages sports desks to accept the presence of women more easily. It makes it easier for female journalists to create a ‘niche’ in terms of their work, enjoying a great degree of autonomy (which varies according to their newspaper’s organizational culture) and to do their job in a way that is pleasing to them. This seems unique to the Swiss daily press.
Yet, as all other studies on women in print sports journalism have observed (particularly Chambers et al., 2004; Hardin and Shain, 2005, 2006), Swiss women journalists remain locked in a relation where men stay dominant. By choosing to cover ‘female’ issues or soft news, and to adopt an emotional approach in their articles, women journalists have a tendency to conform to the role that is assigned to them in the news organizations. They are limited to a certain journalistic register and, like their British counterparts (Boyle, 2006: 151), do not seek to resist this. They do not free themselves from the logic of segregation at work and contribute to making the most prestigious part of the profession the exclusive purview of men. These female sports journalists seemed to internalize the organization’s operational standards and consequently adapted to the dominant male culture: they appeared to conform to a ‘female logic’ (Acker, 1990). This contributes to the definition of masculine and feminine journalistic values and practices, to the reinforcement of the boundaries between men and women, and to the maintenance of the existing gender order in sports journalism. Thus, our analysis of the modalities and the effects of feminization of Swiss-French sports journalism shows that male domination in the profession follows a complex dynamic whose essential supports are the explicit and implicit working rules of sports newsrooms, and to the forging of which both male and women journalists unequally contribute. In this respect, our conclusions coincide with the work of Cocks (1989) as we observe that both males and females help structure gender relations in sports newsrooms, where power seems omnipresent.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.