Airing Their Views: Female Pundits

When Jeanette began her career in broadcasting, she had key female role models she could look up to: Jacqui Oatley, Clare Balding, Sue Barker. “I think it’s really important that you pay homage to the people who have come before you,” she says. “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.” This was true for Jacqui at first. In a meeting at school, the head of careers said: “you know you can’t be a football manager, so what do you really want to do?” This didn’t seem strange, she says: “There wasn’t a moment where he suggested other jobs in sport, and neither did I have the confidence to think, ‘I’ll show you’. I didn’t see any pathway, I didn’t know anybody who knew anybody. I hadn’t got a modicum of self-confidence.” She took a degree in German and then a job in intellectual property, playing football and watching football in every spare moment, even buying a Casio portable TV so she could watch matches on the go, between meetings. “It was a big shock for me that I wasn’t allowed to watch every World Cup and European Championship match,” she laughs. “It felt like an infringement of my basic human rights.”

These mixed emotions resonate with Iona Stephen, too. The Sky Sports and BBC Sport golf broadcaster was also a professional athlete in her sport when she first swapped her clubs for a microphone. Her wrist had been plagued by injuries and she had undergone multiple surgeries when she was approached to screen test for golf presenting. “When I was first asked, after having the trauma of injuries and surgeries, I thought: hell, no,” she recalls. She is speaking from a corner of the Soudal Open course in Belgium, where she is preparing to broadcast. “I’m not going to work in a game that has just broken my heart. I thought, I can’t imagine going to work in golf when I’m not going to be able to play.” Something in her made her say yes, though, and a week later Iona tried presenting at her first event. “It was the best blessing I could have had. I was very fortunate, but it took me a while to transition and accept that I was going to have to say goodbye to my dream of playing and that my future was going to look very different to what I had in mind.”

When Eilidh and I speak, she is on her way to Dundee United, where Celtic are hoping to be crowned title winners. She is also emerging from a Twitter storm, after calling out the Scottish Football Writers’ Association for hosting a guest speaker accused of making sexist, racist and homophobic comments. Eilidh, along with other female guests, staged a walk-out during the speech. She later said she had felt “deep disappointment” and never felt so unwelcome in the industry. As with Jacqui’s experience 15 years ago, the backlash has become a major part of the story, but Eilidh believes that is encouraging. “It’s all about starting conversations and making people aware of what their words can do and how they can affect people,” she explains. “Unless those conversations happen, nothing changes.”

Jeanette sits on the board of the Black Collective of Media in Sport and is passionate about improving diversity, not least to reflect the athletes on the pitch and in the field of play. “It is really hard not to be massively frustrated about things, but we are here for action, [to work out] how you change it. You see so many more people getting opportunities now. I think there’s a lot of work to be done but I do genuinely believe the landscape is changing – and for the better.”

Jacqui has seen momentous changes in her industry, but also in herself. “I think I’m proudest of the fact that I’m confident in my job now,” she says. “In the early days of commentary, I was so terrified, I felt the weight of the world was on my shoulders. Now, I go on air, commentating on world cups, presenting pitch-side, and I don’t get nervous anymore. I look forward to it and I feel like I belong, like I am entitled to do this job. “I’m proud of the fact that I go on air as a happy, confident person.” And, she adds: “It makes me so happy that I am not getting stick for being a woman.”