The Gender of Sports News: Horizontal Segregation and Marginalization of Female Journalists in the Swiss Press

Abstract

This study analyzes the allocation of sport news among female and male journalists in the francophone Swiss daily press. Relying on both quantitative content analysis and qualitative data collected through interviews with female and male sports journalists, it identifies a horizontal segregation within sports newsrooms. An overwhelmingly greater number of male journalists cover the most prestigious subjects and produce greater numbers of technical match reports, taking on what are considered to be the “hardest” news stories. Women are restricted to covering less prestigious sports, women’s sports, and tend to be allocated “soft” stories to report. This article undertakes an in-depth discussion of the gendered nature of this task allocation, exploring the way it affects female and male journalists’ careers.

Keywords

sports journalism female journalists horizontal segregation gender Swiss daily press

Recent decades have seen an increase in the number of female journalists in Switzerland, rising from 17% at the start of the 1980s (Saxer & Schanne, 1981) to 36% in 2008 (Bonfadelli et al., 2011). Female reporters in Switzerland only entered the field of sports journalism more widely from 2000 onwards, later than in other developed countries such as the USA (Creedon & Cramer, 2007). Today, women represent 13% of the workforce within the sports departments of the francophone Swiss press, a similar percentage to that of the USA (Lapchick, 2013) and Australia (Nicholson et al., 2011), where women account for 12% and 10% of newspaper sports reporters, respectively. Despite this increase, half of Swiss sports desks remain exclusively run by men, and sports reporters remain predominantly male. In the context of a journalistic arena that has been, and still is, largely male-dominated, this research paper seeks to examine the gendered division of tasks in sports newsrooms of the francophone Swiss press. Employing quantitative content analysis and qualitative data collected through interviews, it questions the existence of horizontal segregation within sports newsrooms and investigates the dynamics affecting the gendered distribution of tasks between male and female sports reporters.

Literature Review

The extensive literature on women and sport shows that sport is a male domain, structured around hegemonic masculine values that contribute to the reinforcement of historical gender norms (Connell, 2001). Research indicates that the hegemonic masculinity that exists in sport is reflected in sports newsrooms (Whiteside & Hardin, 2012), which remain a “men’s environment” (Organista & Mazur, 2019; Schmidt, 2015). Structural and organizational barriers have caused sports newsrooms to be dominated by men and women to be treated as outsiders, and these barriers have had longstanding relevance in the literature on women working in sports journalism. First, studies have revealed a vertical segregation; women remain few in sports media workplaces and typically occupy lower-ranked positions in their organizational hierarchies (e.g., Hardin et al., 2008; Laucella et al., 2017; Nicholson et al., 2011; Schoch & Ohl, 2011). Overall, studies expose gendered discrimination, difficulties in terms of work–family conciliation, a glass ceiling, female reporters’ necessity to constantly fight to gain recognition and keep their jobs, and resulting tensions in their identity (e.g., Hardin & Shain, 2005, 2006; Organista & Mazur, 2019; Whiteside & Hardin, 2010) . The combination of such factors contributes to women sports journalists’ reduced job satisfaction and often, ultimately, their tendency to leave sports journalism (Hardin & Whiteside, 2012; Hardin et al., 2008; Strong, 2007). Thus, the increased equality in the numbers of women and men working within sports media can obscure the deep-seated gender inequalities surrounding career opportunities and outcomes in the field (Sherwood et al., 2018).

Second, scholars have identified a horizontal segregation, wherein exists (1) a gendered division of tasks and (2) at a micro-level, a gendered division in the types of stories reporters are assigned. (1) The issue of the gendered division of tasks in news and media sectors has been well explored in the literature (e.g., Djerf-Pierre, 2005; Lofgren-Nilsson, 2010; van Zoonen, 1998). Whilst women journalists are overwhelmingly allocated “soft” news, male journalists cover the bulk of “hard” news. This dichotomy reflects the most basic distinction of news types, established by Tuchman (1972). Hard news is categorized as having a high level of newsworthiness and an ability to generate public interest (Tuchman, 1972; Whetmore, 1987). Soft news, on the other hand, is categorized as having less informational value, and generally comprises features and human-interest stories (van Zoonen, 1998). This dichotomy in itself has a gendered nature, as hard news is equated with masculine traits and soft news with feminine traits (North, 2016a). Hard news sits at the top of the news hierarchy, while soft news is considered less prestigious, which, in turn, has significant consequences for journalists’ professional careers (North, 2016a).

Research conducted on the gendered division of news specific to sports journalism shows a process of task allocation that favors men. Gendered allocation exists, dictating who is permitted to cover which sport, proportional to the sport’s significance. Women face difficulties in getting opportunities to cover prestigious sports, championships, and highly regarded sports events (Chambers et al., 2004; Ricchiardi, 2005). They are more regularly assigned coverage of “gender-appropriate” sports (Kian et al., 2011). Organista and Mazur (2019) showed that women more frequently specialize in sports for the disabled or in lesser-known sports where they try to create a niche for themselves in order to survive on the job. Furthermore, several studies have questioned the gendered assignment of journalists to the coverage of men’s or women’s sports. Sports newsrooms have a culture that privileges men’s sports over women’s sports (North, 2012). This leads to the overall unequal coverage of women’s sports (Schmidt, 2018), although a shift toward a more positive coverage of women’s sports has been observed (Laucella et al., 2017; Petty & Pope, 2019; Sherwood et al., 2017). Female sports journalists are more frequently assigned to women’s sports and are often pigeonholed into covering what is considered low-status news within sports journalism (Schmidt, 2018). This is problematic, as Whiteside and Hardin note (2013, p. 150), “access to highly valued assignments (men’s sports) is critical to the promotion process, making a gendered division of labor especially problematic for women.”

(2) In relation to the “gender stereotyping” of skills, issues surrounding the type of stories women and men sports journalists cover in their articles have also been addressed. This often raises questions about the specific contributions of female journalists. Scholars have observed that female sports reporters see themselves as uniquely qualified, because of their gender, to work in sports communication. For example, Hardin and Shain (2005, 2006) showed that US female sports reporters subscribe to and emphasize the notion of a female advantage in sports communication. Female reporters analyzed by Hardin and Whiteside (2012) described themselves as capable of an “extra special touch” and “something different.” Furthermore, they believe that women in journalism have reinvented the field, taking a unique approach to the job and drawing from their own experiences to do so. Analyzing Swiss women sports journalists’ interactions with their male sources, we observed (Schoch, 2013) that female sports reporters encourage the exchange of information they consider to be sincere, authentic, and private in order to write deeper and more “human” articles. Statistics revealed by Schmidt’s research (2018) indicate that women wrote human interest articles more frequently than male journalists in the daily press of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. These findings echo those of studies conducted outside of sports journalism, revealing that the increase in the number of women in journalism has caused the creation of new forms of articles and new ways of practicing journalism (Steiner, 2012).

Scholars have also addressed the question of the cultural consequences of “doing femininity” in the workplace. To this end, and in an attempt to move beyond the prism of institutional barriers to better understand gendered meaning-making in sports workplaces, Hardin and Whiteside (2012) used Fröhlich’s (2004) notion of the “friendliness trap.” They demonstrated that perceived “natural” feminine qualities that invite women to see themselves as naturally strong communicators are negatively recoded when women are evaluated for leadership positions, thus explaining why management in the field remains male-dominated. Using the same concept, Sherwood et al. (2018) similarly observed that women in Australian sport public relations found that, overall, their gender was a disadvantage, despite agreeing that assumptions around stereotypically feminine traits increased their employability for such a role. This same study further highlighted that structural factors intersect with individual dimensions, such as experiences in the workplace and perceptions of opportunities, to reinforce these sport workplaces as organizational inequality regimes.

Against this backdrop, some scholars have argued that the mere presence of women in journalism does not automatically lead to a feminization of journalistic practices and content, as female journalists are often not given sufficient autonomy (Damian-Gaillard et al., 2010) or do not necessarily develop gender-consciousness, much less female-specific approaches to work (Steiner, 2012). While some female sports reporters actively position their gender as an advantage (Hardin & Whiteside, 2009; Whiteside & Hardin, 2013) in an attempt to transform their minority status into a professional resource (Lachover, 2005), others, as seen in the case of Israeli media, adopt practices of identification with the dominant masculinity and a strong resemblance can be observed between male and female writing in sports sections (Tamir et al., 2017). In the same vein, whilst some studies have observed that female sports journalists write more often and more positively about women’s sports (Kian & Hardin, 2009; Schmidt, 2018), such a link is not always found and greater diversity in sports newsrooms does not necessarily lead to a greater coverage of women’s sports (Laucella et al., 2017). These behaviors have been analyzed by some scholars, who have noted the “token” status of women sports journalists in a domain of journalism that remains male-dominated. References to patriarchy and to women’s repression of their feminine sensibility as a result of internalized sexism have been offered as explanations for why women do not necessarily take a different approach to journalism (Steiner, 2012). Scholars have argued that achieving a critical mass of women beyond tokenism will likely allow female reporters to assert more independence and enact change (Laucella et al., 2017; Steiner, 2012).

Research Questions

The production of news is not “gender neutral” (Ruoho & Torkkola, 2018). Scholars have pointed out the different expectations men and women journalists face, which influence their professional practices (e.g., North, 2012; van Zoonen, 1998). Further, they have shown that gender expectations are embedded in daily practices, routines, and rituals, and that cultural signifiers interact with the gendered division of labor in the newsroom (Lofgren-Nilsson, 2010). This might lead to women remaining restricted to a supposedly “feminine” form of journalism.

Against this background, this study aims to examine the allocation of tasks between female and male sports journalists working in the francophone Swiss daily press. It particularly analyzes the allocation of (1) the various sports, (2) women’s and men’s sport, and (3) story angles (technical, human-interest, etc.) between female and male journalists. It further investigates the rationale underlying this task allocation, questioning the role of gender, defined as the relations of power between the sexes, and the constructs at the foundation of sports journalism of values that are differentiated and hierarchized around a masculine/feminine divide. Are female or male reporters more often assigned to certain subjects? Are male or female sports reporters more interested in certain subjects or stories and why? Are women journalists restricted to a “feminine” form of sports journalism, and do some resist these restrictions? To answer these questions, our investigation will focus on the way gender interacts with the organizational variables of sports newsrooms and reporters’ responses to these organizational contexts, in line with the work of de Bruin and Ross (2004) and North (2009). We believe that in order to comprehend the gendered processes impacting task allocation within sports newsrooms, we need to take into account both the organizational contexts and the individual dimensions of female and male reporters within these structures.

Theoretical Framework

We have drawn upon Bourdieu’s theory (1980, 1984) and his notions of “field,” “doxa,” and “capital” to incorporate structural elements of news organizations and individual factors in explanation of the division of labor within sports newsrooms. For Bourdieu, a “field” is defined as a “field of forces” that is partially autonomous, wherein symbolic struggles are featured (Bourdieu, 1980). The media landscape can be analyzed as a field and every journalistic specialty can be considered a subfield, which operates like a microcosm (Marchetti, 2005). As within other fields, we may observe that the dominant social group imposes a specific “doxa,” that corresponds, in journalism, to the “explicit orthodox/heterodox news values which are part of the sphere of journalistic judgment, and the implicit, silent doxic news values which are part of the sphere of journalistic doxa” (Schultz, 2007, p. 15). The doxa of sports journalism is what defines the values attributed to various subjects and stories. The control that the doxa exercises can be the very foundation for the symbolic violence that results in the exclusion of certain profiles of journalists, particularly women, from valued tasks and the highest ranks of the profession.

In the field of media, positions are at stake, and are determined by the allocation of a specific form of “capital” (Bourdieu, 1984). The journalists with the highest levels of this capital are those who control the doxa of the newspaper, select and delegate papers or topics, exercise the power to choose who has access to important positions, and are able to either valorize or belittle colleagues’ work. Journalists’ background and capital have further impacts on the nature of their work experiences, particularly upon the way they gauge the value or newsworthiness of certain subjects. According to Bourdieu, journalistic style can be seen as a reflection of a journalist’s position in the field of sports journalism and is dependent upon his/her capital and gender. Journalistic capital is comprised of a journalist’s diploma, professional experience, and the quality of their writing (Bourdieu, 1992). Gender can also work as a form of capital (Djerf-Pierre, 2005). In the subfield of sports journalism, sports capital can also be considered an important type of capital (Marchetti, 2005). This capital may be acquired through sporting experience, especially in the form of medals won in national and international contests. However, there is another specific type of capital gained through experience of sports culture; that is, a knowledge of main events that have shaped local or national collective sporting identities, the capacity to remember facts, write “good” stories about sports, or an understanding of specialist jargon (Marchetti, 2005). Therefore, we follow Bourdieu (1993), arguing that the definition of legitimate journalism and the value attributed to different subjects and stories must be understood as arising from the relationship between journalists’ capital and the doxa of the field. This intersection shapes journalists’ “taste” and explains the way journalists define what makes a news-story valuable (Bourdieu, 1980).

Methods

This research draws on two complementary sets of data. First, it is based on the analysis of a corpus of press articles. Due to its multilingualism, Switzerland lacks truly national media; most Swiss dailies have a local/regional distribution, no precise political positioning, and cannot be strictly classified as either highbrow or popular. Only two newspapers distinguish themselves from the others: Le Temps, which is the only broadsheet newspaper, and Le Matin, a popular newspaper. Both are distributed throughout the whole francophone part of the country. In this study, we analyzed every signed sports article published over a period of six months (January to June 2016) in four dailies chosen as representative of the diversity of the francophone Swiss press: the two supra-regional newspapers, Le Matin and Le Temps, and the two most important regional newspapers in terms of their wide diffusion, La Liberté and 24 Heures.

We conducted a quantitative analysis of 4,817 articles using the statistical software SPSS. This content analysis involved 22 items, including the publication source, sex and name of the author, subjects covered in the article (sports, sex of the athletes in the articles, etc.), type of article (report, portrait, interview, etc.), and the stylistic approach (technical, descriptive, scientific, etc.). Due to the large size of the corpus, all coding was conducted by one researcher with fluency in French. Most of the coding questions were not ambiguous and pertained to factual items (e.g., sex of the journalist, length and type of article, etc.). The few questions more open to interpretation were discussed by a larger team with the support of a sample of articles. The findings, based on frequency patterns, allowed us to investigate the gendered task allocation in these dailies as well as the existence of gendered journalistic profiles.

Second, we collected qualitative data through semi-structured interviews with sports journalists. These interviews were conducted to investigate the sociology of sports journalism in view of the increasing numbers of female journalists working in this field. Task allocation was one of the issues raised in the interviews. Other issues raised included sports socialization, family and educational background, professional trajectory and expectations, views on the functioning of their newsroom and the situation of women in (sports) journalism. Twenty-five sports journalists were interviewed (12 women, 13 men), which corresponds to roughly 40% of the study population.

We interviewed every female journalist with a permanent position in Switzerland and one woman who had worked in sports journalism for several years but had recently moved to another journalistic specialty. We interviewed all the sport editors of the 14 daily newspapers in French-speaking Switzerland, who were all men, with the exception of one, who refused to give us an interview. In the Swiss daily press, sport editors are responsible for the production and content of the sports section, while also continuing to work as reporters. They present themselves as reporters and not editors, and thus this paper will do the same. The interviews lasted an average of 80 minutes and were recorded and transcribed with the informed consent of the interviewees. A thematic analysis was undertaken, with the topics framing the interview grid. In this paper, all identifying names of individuals, organizations, and places have been removed from the presentation of interview data in order to ensure anonymity.

Findings

Distribution of the Bylines by Gender

As shown in the Table 1, despite rising numbers of female journalists in the Swiss press, men dominated the news bylines of the analyzed corpus, with 90% of news written exclusively by men and only 9% by women. Female journalists remain almost invisible in the major French-speaking sporting press.

Table 1.

Proportion of Articles in the Corpus Written by Male and Female Journalists.

Sex of the journalists	Number of articles
Women	9%
Men	90%
Co-signed (man and women)	1%
Total	100

Coverage of Different Sports

In Switzerland, soccer and ice hockey are the sports that generate the most public interest. As in most European countries, soccer has increased in popularity in Switzerland since the second half of the 20th century (Vonnard, 2018). Furthermore, due to the Swiss alpine environment, winter sports such as ice hockey, form the basis of its sports culture. The media coverage of these two sports seems to be little affected by the level of play or the sporting success of Swiss teams in major international championships, unlike other sports, whose coverage is more dependent on the success of Swiss athletes. Unsurprisingly, soccer and ice hockey are therefore widely covered by Swiss daily newspapers (Table 2). As indicated in Table 3, these two sports occupy a far greater proportion of male journalists’ output (44%) than women’s (10%). In fact, 98% and 99% of the articles devoted to soccer and ice hockey, respectively, were written by men. Women are largely excluded from covering the most prestigious sports. A significant part of women’s journalistic work is devoted to secondary sports and minor sports (including swimming, boxing, gymnastics, rugby, golf, etc.) that, altogether, compose a greater part of their total work (69% and 21%, respectively), in comparison with men’s work (45% and 11%, respectively).

Table 2.

Most Frequently Covered Sports.

Sport	Percentage of all articles
Soccer	22%	Major sports
Ice hockey	20%
Alpine skiing	9%	Secondary sports
Tennis	8%
Basketball	5%
Automobile sport	5%
Cycling	5%
Track and field	2.5%
Motorcycling	2.5%
Equestrian sports	2.5%
Volleyball	1.5%
Sailing	1.5%
Nordic skiing	1.2%
Others (n = 67)	< 1%	Minor sports

Table 3.

Proportion of the Different Sports in the Work of Women and Men Journalists (in %).

	Major sports		Secondary sports											Minor sports
	Soccer	Ice hockey	Alpine skiing	Tennis	Basketball	Automobile	Cycling	Track and field	Motorcycling	Equestrian sports	Volleyball	Sailing	Nordic skiing	Others	Total
Female output	7	3	17	5	1	3	9	4	1	4	17	8	0	21	100
	10		69
Male output	24	20	9	9	6	5	5	3	2	2	1	1	2	11	100
	44		45

Two key elements can explain significant differences in the forms of capital possessed by the female and male journalists interviewed; capital that can drive the gendered distribution of sports coverage. First, there are differences in terms of access to jobs. The increasing number of women working in the sports sections of the francophone Swiss press since 2000 may be due to ethical reasons; to promote a more balanced treatment of sports news. It may also stem from the desire to engender a positive image for the newspaper. However, it is primarily the result of particular editorial decisions based on marketing considerations. Editors-in-chief assume that women can develop a new approach to sports news that might attract a new readership less familiar with sport. Two female reporters described their recruitment, revealing that they perceived it as the result of positive discrimination. This caused them to attribute their success largely to their sex rather than their individual skills and capabilities:

They offered me the job because I was a woman. Otherwise I wouldn’t have got it.

I have been hired because I was a woman and they expected me to bring, as a woman, a different outlook on sport.

As a consequence of this recruitment process, our female and male interviewees did not have the same journalistic profiles. Most women in our sample had not initially desired to work in this journalistic field (only two of the 12 women interviewed did). Each female interviewee had been a freelancer within several news specialties during their studies, but had never been involve in sports journalism. Nonetheless, they each had a strong journalistic background upon entering sports journalism. Due to their atypical trajectories in forming a career in sports journalism, some female reporters felt that they were in an uncomfortable position when they began working in the field. For example, one female interviewee expressed: “I never thought about being a sports journalist. I wanted to do journalism, but not in sports. I liked sports, but it wasn’t…And when I started, I was a bit worried about it.” In the case of this reporter, her lack of initial experience in sports journalism and the fact that her gender may have played a large role in her recruitment had been clearly expressed by her editors might have combined to create her feelings of self-doubt. In contrast, all male interviewees had entered the profession by starting out as freelancers within the subfield of sport. Most of them had been trained solely in sports journalism and had a professional profile as a specialist sports journalist.

The male journalists in our sample display strong competences in the domain of sport, having often developed an interest in sport as a spectator or supporter more than through actual sporting practice. In the interviews, male journalists repeatedly evoked their passion for sports, particularly soccer and ice hockey:

I am a big fan of sports. Sport is everything to me.

For me, soccer is everything. I’ve been a huge fan of English football since I was little.

All male interviewees presented themselves as sports fans. It seemed that they had found a means of living out their passion through sports journalism. Indeed, male interviewees’ passion for sport was strongly linked to their experiences as fans and their experiences of sport as means of socializing with their peers. This was not the case for the female journalists we interviewed, who reported a poor level of socialization with regards to sport fandom. Furthermore, with the exception of one pioneer who had entered sports journalism in the 80s, the female interviewees did not present themselves as sports fans, even if they previously had experience of sport in some way. Male reporters, on the contrary, emphasized their experience of sport through socializing and through practice during the interviews. They presented this as a sign of their excellent knowledge of sport, particularly of soccer and ice hockey (rules, history of the clubs, careers of the coaches and players, past championship results, etc.).

Consequently, the careers of the males in our study reflect a reliance on specific capital related to the sporting field that follows the doxa of the sports journalism subfield. Female interviewees, on the other hand, tend to occupy a more heterodox position, relying on general journalistic competences. This initial lack of specific capital results in them appearing less legitimate within sports newsrooms and in their exclusion from the most prestigious subjects. Such prestigious subjects include soccer and ice hockey, wherein journalists have the opportunity to interact with popular athletes and cover a subject that is popular with the public. As male journalists possess specific capital and attain greater seniority, they are able to access and monopolize coverage of these prestigious sports. The fact that males occupy positions of power in the (sports) newsrooms enables male journalists to keep the coverage of the most coveted sports for themselves through a “cooptation process” (Melin-Higgins, 2004).

Furthermore, female interviewees do not pay the normal fees to enter into sports journalism and often make sacrifices to remain in this specialty. Speaking about her sports desk colleagues (all male), one female reporter recounted: “At first they were going to drink their coffee without me. It may have taken six months for one of them to just ask me where I lived! It was really…really hard at first. I was invisible at first.” What she describes here is a form of “symbolic violence,” understood as “the subtle imposition of systems of meaning that legitimize and thus solidify structures of inequality” (Wacquant, 1998, p. 217). This “symbolic violence” led her and most her female colleagues whom we interviewed to voluntarily renounce noble parts of their profession. As highlighted by this female interviewee, soccer and ice hockey are highly coveted in sports newsrooms: “For my colleagues, they’re really the two ‘king sports’. They want to cover them more than anything!” However, this female reporter seems to keep her distance from these two sports. Another female reporter explained:

No, but I’m really less competent in soccer and ice hockey than my colleagues. They know everything! It’s much more logical that they’re the ones who report on them. And I’m less interested in it anyway.

This testimony reveals that tensions within male-dominated sport newsrooms affect female reporters. In her case, they have led her to question her own aptitude and to feel less competent than her male colleagues. Therefore, letting their male colleagues cover prestigious sports and finding a peripheral niche might be a way for female journalists to minimize these tensions.

Coverage of Women and Men’s Sport

Overall, the data indicates that men’s sports comprise the bulk of sports news coverage, with more than three quarters of articles taking this subject. Contrastingly, women’s sports have minimal coverage. Articles focusing on both women’s and men’s sports comprise another 8% of the total. Thus, women are the subject of only 16% of articles, whereas men are the subject of 85% of articles. During the interviews, male journalists clearly indicated that women’s sport was of less value than men’s sport. Echoing Schmidt (2018), they declared that the current level of women’s sport coverage was appropriate and adequate. For example, one male reporter claimed:

Yeah, but we need to be honest. For the moment women’s sport is still very far behind men’s sport. The level is still really much lower compared to men’s sport, so I think that women’s coverage is fair. And it is not macho to say that, it is simply the truth!

Several female interviewees declared that they consider the current level of women’s sport coverage to be inappropriate and unfair, and that they have actively tried to increase it in their newspaper. However, they have encountered their male colleagues’ disapproval. One female reporter said, for example:

When there was the Swiss Soccer Cup final, the women’s final was scheduled before the men’s match. I said it would be nice to do something about the women’s final. My colleagues said: ‘Oh, f*** that!’ Of course, it’s still a bit macho.

According to female reporters’ testimonies, male journalists manage to impose “their” hierarchy in relation to women’s and men’s sports as a norm, and female reporters do not have enough power to contest it.

As further shown by Table 4, men devote a large part of their output to covering men’s sports (78%). In contrast, female journalists tend to cover women’s sports more than their male counterparts, comprising 22% and 8% of their output, respectively. In terms of the division of sports coverage, this distribution of women’s and men’s sport between the journalists results, in part, from the personal choices made by women. Women often have a greater affinity with sports that are mixed and/or female, which, in turn, is a result of a socially constructed concept of femininity (Bourdieu, 1980). This distribution is also the result of assignments being allocated on the basis of gender stereotypes by editors-in-chief and sports editors, making it appear “logical” to allocate women’s sport to female journalists and men’s sports to male journalists. Finally, the allocation of subject coverage is largely decided during the daily briefings carried out by the heads of sports newsrooms, in dialogue with the sports journalists. Our data show that a “male homosociability” (Lofgren-Nilsson, 2010) exists, that benefits male journalists and allows them to leave the undesirable tasks to their female colleagues.

Table 4.

Comparison of Articles About Women and Men in Terms of the Sex of the Journalist as a %.

	Men’s sports	Women’s sports	Both women’s and men’s sports	Not directly related to women or men	Total
Female output	47	22	11	20	100
Male output	78	8	8	7	100
Whole corpus	77	8	8	7	100

Allocation of Story Angles

To grasp the perspectives from which female and male journalists’ stories are reported, we have analyzed the types of articles written (Figure 1) and the types of approaches adopted (Figure 2).

Figure 1.

Types of articles in terms of the sex of the journalist.

Figure 2.

Types of approach in terms of the sex of the journalist.

The data indicate that men devote a large portion of their work to reporting sports matches (44% of their output). They often adopt a descriptive, fact-based approach and include technical and tactical analysis (74% of their articles). These characteristics fit with what male interviewees define as the “right” way to treat sport news:

The chief did ask us numerous times during meetings to do something other than match reports. He says we need to diversify more in terms of the kinds of articles we offer and develop less technical approaches. But we don’t agree with that approach here at the desk, technical match reports are the foundation.

As highlighted by this comment, the male journalists we interviewed considered match reports to be the most valuable sports “story.” Match reports focus on the technical aspect of sports coverage as well as dealing with timely stories. Women also draft conventional match reports, meaning they are not completely excluded from this task. However, compared to male journalists, they produce more profiles, investigations, and what is referred to in Switzerland as “magazine-type” articles. The latter offer a treatment of information that is similar to a magazine style, covering topics not necessarily related to current news stories. Furthermore, women tend to engage in fewer technical approaches than men, showing preference for a narrative or scientific style. These types of articles and approaches are more favorable to the development of angles that are not strictly sporting in terms of content, as well as somewhat softer news stories.

Male interviewees tend to consider these soft angles to be of secondary importance. Speaking about one of his female colleagues, a male reporter declared: “Yeah, but it is not the same for her. She mainly does magazine articles.” The journalist implied that his female colleague does not really do sports journalism because a large part of her work consists of producing magazine articles. These represent soft stories par excellence, and, as observed in the previous excerpt, they tend to be denigrated by male journalists. This dichotomy and hierarchy between soft and hard story angles in sport is imposed by male journalists, who dominate this journalistic subfield. They have a strong interest in supporting the legitimacy of sports-specific approaches that fit with and valorize their specific sport capital.

The root of the gendered way in which hard/soft stories are allocated in sports journalism lies in the processes of recruitment as well as the editor’s management of workplace teams. Female journalists’ testimonies have revealed that editors’ expectations of a more “feminine” approach to sports news were clearly expressed at the time of their recruitment, and that this has weighed, to some extent, on their work: “The editors wanted this diversity, to have a man and a woman. […] They are really happy, because they think that a woman brings a different kind of sensibility, that the perspective is a bit different.” Expectations of an approach to sport news that is equated with feminine traits is reinforced daily through positive feedback on soft stories and, above all, through the allocation of tasks. Editors perceive technical match reports as masculine, whereas softer stories focusing on the sideshows are perceived as feminine. This dichotomy is particularly visible during big sports events, where several female journalists interviewed were allocated only soft stories, while their male colleagues were in charge of covering the matches:

Julie came with us for the Swiss Soccer Cup final. She had just arrived, and the editor sent her with us. She brought what she could to the team. There were four of us, we had put in a lot of effort. But, in principle, she was not there to do match reports. That was our job, the three of us. (male reporter)

This gender-typing contributes to establishing men’s contributions as the norm and defines feminine subjects and angles as the “other.” It places women in a peripheral position within sports newsrooms. Among our female interviewees, only one contested her subordinate position within her sports newsrooms. She sought to develop technical approaches and to cover soccer. She is ambitious and completely aware that showing her skills in these coveted tasks will be required to succeed. However, other female interviewees did not challenge the gendered allocation of tasks, nor did they express any particular desire for promotion during the interviews. Rather, they displayed a kind of indifference, claiming they do not seek to ascend the professional hierarchies, a position which likely obscures a form of resignation.

Among the journalists we interviewed, this gender-typing was reinforced by their regular assignment of the coverage of secondary sports. Mastering the rules, techniques, and game strategies of all the secondary and minor sports they cover, which sometimes includes uncommon practices (base-jump, slackline, etc.), is difficult, even after several years in the profession. Yet, female journalists’ testimonies revealed that when they lacked specific knowledge about a sport, they found easier to produce a “background” article with a human angle than to produce a classical report:

There was nobody for the sailing, so I was asked if I could do it. I said “yes,” I will, but sailing is incredibly complicated because there is a huge technical vocabulary and things to know. Sailing is tough. Then I said to myself, because 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.

Finally, female journalists’ testimonies revealed that developing soft stories is a way for them to legitimize their place by showing that they can bring something of value to their section. Most of them claim to have a “female perspective” on sports news and try to highlight the gendered nature of their writing, as can be seen in this comment:

Reporter: It’s clear that women have a different sensibility and write different papers.

Researcher: Ah, do you think? Why?

Reporter: Well, I guess it is linked to our education, the way we are educated differently, boys and girls. And then, I think that after we do not see the world through the same eyes.

This reporter claims a gender difference in her writing. Mentioning gender socialization, she considers gender as a construct and therefore presents the “feminine” as something valuable that she, as a woman, can bring to the sports pages of her newspaper. For her, it is a way to turn the “stigma” of gender into an emblem of journalistic innovation, thereby neutralizing challenges to her participation in this journalistic sub-field.

Discussion and Conclusion

This study relies on the analysis of a corpus of press articles and shows a horizontal segregation within the four major French-speaking Swiss newspapers in terms of both the sports covered but also, on a micro level, in the types of stories reporters are allocated. On the one hand, male sports journalists overwhelmingly cover the most prestigious subjects (popular sports, especially the top two most prestigious sports of soccer and ice hockey, and men’s sports generally) and produce far more technical match reports. They focus on what are perceived as the “hardest” or “hottest” news in terms of both topics and types of articles. On the other hand, women are restricted to more secondary sports, women’s sport and, as observed in other news areas (e.g., Lofgren-Nilsson, 2010; North, 2016b), are overwhelmingly allocated soft stories that require less sports expertise. Our study confirms that, as seen in US and Australian newspapers (Schmidt, 2018), female journalists in Switzerland wrote human interest articles more frequently. It shows however that gender differences in task allocation can be observed beyond the type of articles or the theme of the article, and also seen in the approach from which female and male journalists’ stories are reported.

To examine the gendered nature of the allocation of tasks, the study has drawn on Bourdieu’s theory and investigated sports journalists’ working experiences against their social backgrounds, working conditions, and the larger structures of power within the sports journalism subfield. It shows that female journalists have been recruited into sports newsrooms of the Swiss press since the 2000s by editors who have expected them to develop a “feminine” approach to sport news. This attitude towards female journalists attests to a correspondence between what are considered stereotypical female journalistic practices and the commercial nature of journalism (van Zoonen, 1998). However, a unique aspect of our study is that most of the female reporters we interviewed did not want to work in sports journalism in the first place, which, as we have shown, makes editorial expectations of them to use their female traits in their roles all the more efficient. Consequently, while women began entering this historically male-dominated journalistic subfield, the coexistence of men and women alongside gender stereotypes meant assigning them to different tasks. Subjects and types of stories are allocated to reporters depending on representations of what is considered masculine and feminine; a gender-typing of journalistic skills and a gendered management occurs within newsrooms.

Furthermore, gender appears to be a decisive factor in the work culture of sports sections. Our study confirms that the sports newsroom’s work culture is hegemonically masculine (Schmidt, 2018) and shows that women’s daily interactions with their male colleagues hinders their access to carrying out valuable tasks. It further highlights that, due to the way they socialize, female and male sports journalists possess different forms of capital, women more often being multi-skilled journalists, while men tend to be specialists in sport. This legitimizes and strengthens the gendered allocation of tasks and explains why it is rarely challenged by journalists, another key finding of this study.

Echoing Sherwood et al. (2017), this paper provides evidence that female traits are highlighted as a positive in Swiss sports journalism and that female journalists’ contributions are perceived as valuable. Female journalists themselves claim to have a “female perspective” on sports news and use gender as a form of capital (Djerf-Pierre, 2005). However, by covering female issues and adopting soft approaches in their articles, they remain limited to a certain journalistic register that is devalued. Men monopolize the technical repertoire of sports, while women are assigned to more peripheral developments, to the “world of human things.” This distribution reflects a binary representation where the technical, the hard, and the hot are masculine, and are seen as superior to the passive, the soft, and the cold, which are perceived as feminine in Western societies (Heritier, 1996). This contributes to the hierarchization of female and male journalists' outputs. Furthermore, male journalists still dominate this social space and impose the traditional doxa as the standard for quality work. As a first consequence, though editors may value the gendered inflection brought about by female journalists’ work, the way in which men treat sports news is imposed as the “normal” one and feminine subjects and approaches are deemed to be of secondary importance. This dichotomy is reactivated daily, and is entrenched in sports newsrooms in francophone Switzerland.

A second consequence is the value attributed to women’s sports. Sherwood et al. (2017) have observed small changes in Australian newspapers, noting that some factors governing the sports news have changed to facilitate the coverage of women’s sports. In the Swiss newspapers investigated in this study, such conditions allowing for more coverage of women’s sports were not met. The distribution of sports news remains largely divided along gender lines. Furthermore, women’s sports continue to be considered of lesser value and as unable to generate audience interest by male journalists occupying positions of power within sports newsrooms, who largely determine the newsworthiness of subjects. The division of tasks and the meaning of these different tasks (sports, types of stories) currently prevent the development of more positive vision of women’s sports in the Swiss newspapers analyzed.

Finally, our study shows that female sports journalists interviewed seem to have internalized newspapers’ operational standards and consequently adapted to the dominant male culture. They have a tendency to conform to the role assigned to them by news organizations and comply with a “female logic” (Acker, 1990). They do not free themselves from the logic of segregation at work. As other studies on women in print sports journalism have revealed (particularly Hardin & Shain, 2006; Organista & Mazur, 2019), Swiss women journalists remain locked in a relationship wherein men remain dominant and they continue to be marginalized.

This paper has some limitations. First, the study analyzed only four Swiss newspapers and interviewed a sample of sports reporters; thus, the results cannot be generalized to the wider field. In particular, some newspapers might provide greater women’s sports and minor sports coverage. In the same vein, some reporters with different background and training might escape the oppositions between male and female sports journalists and the gender-based task allocation that this paper has highlighted. Another limitation is that the study has interviewed male sports editors, and low-status male reporters have not been interviewed. There is a limitation in comparing their trajectories and perspectives with female interviewees who do not occupy similar positions in the newsrooms. Nonetheless, editors have significant roles in Swiss newsrooms, and their views on female reporters and the coverage of the various sports are significant and have been helpful to grasp the gendered processes that impact the allocation of tasks within sports newsrooms. It has helped us demonstrate that the allocation of tasks as divided between female and male journalists contributes to the establishment of a hierarchy between feminine and masculine journalistic values and practices and between female and male journalists and remains one of the essential mechanisms in the perpetuation of male dominance in sports journalism.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Lucie Schoch

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