The very first thing that Alex Jones said on Monday evening when the shortlist for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year was announced live on the One Show was “they’re all men”. She sounded quite shocked – and rightly so.
She was not alone. World champion swimmer Rebecca Adlington took to Twitter to say that there were many women in sport who deserve recognition this year.
Attention was also given to how those shortlists were made up – voted for predominantly by male sports editors of national newspapers and, inexplicably, representatives of lads’ Mags Nuts and Zoo.
Four MPs, our own Jo Swinson, and Labour’s Stella Creasy, Alison McGovern and Joan Walley, have asked for a meeting with BBC Director General Mark Thomson to “discuss how to improve the celebration of women in sporting life.”
Their letter to him said:
This outcome is extremely unhelpful to the promotion of women’s’ sport in the UK. It will result in the annual TV programme – usually a great occasion for British sport – ignoring women’s achievements in 2011.
This bias has led to a number of outstanding sporting achievements by women being entirely disregarded. Rebecca Adlington, Keri-Anne Payne, Victoria Pendleton, Chrissie Wellington, Nicola Adams, Jessica Ennis, Sarah Stevenson, Beth Tweddle, Hannah England and Kath Grainger, among others, have all been fantastically successful within their respective fields, yet none have made the shortlist. Chrissie Wellington, for example, has set two new world records in 2011. She even won the 2011 Ironman World Championship race despite suffering from a number of serious injuries, but has not received any recognition for this on the shortlist.
A great deal of work is done each year by the sporting community to encourage women and girls into sport, and the absence of women from this award severely undermines those efforts.
They specifically raised the issue of the inclusion of Nuts and Zoo while women’s and sports magazines were left out of the process and asked for action to make sure that we don’t end up with an all male shortlist in future years.
We will bring you news of the reply they receive in due course.
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15 Comments
Have you actually looked at how the different judges voted? Lots of women were voted for, just none of them consistently.
Hard to say any female sportspeople definitively deserved recognition even allowing for low profile. The call here is effectively for quotas and tokenism ? Patronising effectively which is as dangerous and pernicious a form of bigotry as outright sexism.
The real issue is to raise the profile of female sport. This will not be done by tokenistically fitting women into an award. The danger with the cheap gimmicists of Westminster is they always tackle symptoms not the cause.
It was the votes of Zoo and Nuts that gave Amir Khan the 10th place ahead of Becki Adlington.
Also the MEN are clearly unaware of the rules of what they were voting for as they voted for 3 overseas footballers
Oh – MEN above means Manchester Evening News rather than people of male gender!
It’s not tokenism at all – these women are world champions in their own right and they have been unfairly overlooked. I think that the fact that something like this can happen is a huge sign that we need to rethink the way we promote sport in this country.
This is one of the most prestigious sports awards in the country – it’s showed at prime time and has money thrown at it. To present an all male shortlist when there are equally female contenders is wrong – and the fact that they included Nuts and Zoo in the sporting process but no magazines aimed at women shows that it is very deeply flawed.
Rebecca Adlington actually believes that all the men on the sports personality shortlist deserve to be there – http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/sports_personality/15970401.stm
Would the author like to expand and say which male athlete(s) does not merit recognition?
There is certainly an issue in regard to those who devise the list. However, sporting magazines weren’t completely excluded as ‘Sport Magazine’ submitted nominations.
I think it’s interesting to note that the well known misogynistic lads mag – The Independent – also contained no mention of women. Perhaps they should be similarly excluded from the process in the future, or does such criticism only apply to publications which you personally find distasteful?
This silly award is all about the cult of celebrity and nothing much to do with sport. Having said that, the discrimination against women is institutionalised in the process and needs kicking out.
“This silly award is all about the cult of celebrity and nothing much to do with sport.”
What utter rubbish Tony. Particularly as the current holder is Tony McCoy.
@Leslie – AIUI It was the sports editors on that list who drew up the lists – so it makes sense to use the major newspapers. I don’t find Nuts & Zoo any more distasteful than the Mail. I just never realised they had such in depth coverage of sport.
Out of interest is there a single magazine targeted at women that has regular coverage of sport (either male or female)?
I reckon ALL awards programmes are self-indulgent faff. Oscars downwards. People who are good at what they do are good at what they do. Pathetic attempts to rank oranges against carrots are just commercial diversion.Is horse riding really a sport? I rate it seriously below FOCUS delivering 😉
The real problem seems to be that a good opportunity to promote women’s sport is being missed. But there will be more, the coalition’s huge cut in the BBC’s budget could mean much more coverage, because it’s much cheaper.
The merits of awards to recognise personality aside, it’s difficult to merit recognition to the achievement of many ‘world champions’.
The pinnacle of swimming achievement is the Olympics, and they haven’t been held this year, so the achievement of a world champion is relatively less. You might ask why we don’t recognise the world champion for conkers or tiddlywinks? Or is this really a story about media intoxicated by self-promotion and relativist evaluation of performance?
The social factor here is that professional sport is biased towards physical capability and the female sports economy is therefore unable to support so many elite-level women as men, and does so in less popular fields. Media caters to its audience, and the common preconception is that women watch less sport and are more likely to watch male performers than the reverse. The consequence is inevitable and the controversy should be seen as an expression of gender-defined behaviour patterns by women equally as much as men.
Anyway, as far as I can see this award is not about success in the sporting arena, but the ability to use success to transcend it and crossover into the cultural realm. If having a twitter account and tabloid profile is qualification enough then it’s a meaningless excuse for a shin-dig.
And that’s precisely what it’s become. Professional athletes should be grateful to be rewarded so much better than the rest of us for doing something they are good at and have a passion for. Back-biting over self-aggrandising trinkets is simply demeaning – if that’s what these sportspeople represent it’s hardly surprising participation rates and general standards are falling.
Sorry, Ms Adlington, your complaint sets a bad example and could harm your cause by disqualifying you from future consideration. It promotes growth in health inequality – you are peeing in the pool!
The correct response was “it was a great year for UK sport… any number of people could have made the shortlist… those who are on the shortlist had amazing years and all deserve to be there, unfortunately somebody will always have to miss out… I look forward to next year and the Olympics, which could be even better.”
I was as bemused by the inclusion of some apparently-random regional papers by the inclusion of Nuts and Zoo.
Agree that a lot of it is about women’s sport having a lower profile, but that doesn’t mean we should just shrug our shoulders and accept it. The BBC has overlooked women’s sport for years – see their decision to show men’s golf instead of the women’s world cup quarter final – and this shortlist is the result. Women’s sport reaches an incredibly high standard, and where it lags behind men’s sport it’s often because of lack of resources to pay for professionalism, training, etc – so a chicken-egg situation.
So what to do about it? No-one likes tokenism, but the effects of this are incredibly damaging on young women, who get the message that sport isn’t for them. It should be clear that sexism has no role in sport, and that includes excluding sexist media outlets from nominations. There should also be more, and louder, criticism when people make sexist comments in sport – when all this kicked off yesterday, the GB coxless four tweeted that since women had the FHM sexiest 100, it was OK that men had the sports personality of the year award! It shouldn’t be OK to say that even in jest!
Going further, I wonder if, given the BBC is a public service broadcaster, more pressure could be put on them to show women’s sport on a regular basis. I don’t know what percentage of their current coverage includes women, but I would imagine that it’s pretty low, and requiring a minimum percentage to include women could well go a long way – even putting it on BBC3 during the day would be a start!
Apols to Ms Adlington – that is almost exactly what she said… good for her.
Laura, what would you like to watch women perform?
Could this not be solved more easily and equitably by having two awards – i.e. Sportsman of the Year and Sportswoman of the Year?