Shades of Whatever

good:

Boys’ Clubhouse: Why Women Should Write About Sports

Just 10 percent of all sports columnists last year were women, according to the latest report from the Women’s Media Center. It’s time for sports editors to look outside their regular lineups. Go out and recruit smart women journalists, even if they haven’t been obsessing over stats since they were 5. Offer them the chance to cover not just the action on the field, but the ramifications off it. Show them their perspective is valued, not as a token, but as a required part of the conversation. 

Read the story on GOOD→ 

And then screen all her phone calls for her so she never has to answer one phone call from a drunken jackass calling her 15 minutes before deadline to ask her some idiotic question about Ron Artest to settle a bar bet, responding to her courteous response of “I don’t know, read a fucking book, sir” by commanding her to hand the phone over to “a man or someone who knows anything about sports, sweetheart.”

I endured three years of that. I had an ulcer and stress-related hair loss at 24. Off the desk, when I explained my job to someone, the response was either “Do you know anything about sports?” or the even more disappointingly common “Don’t you have to be really smart to do that?”

And also, my entire life was somehow turned into a shitty TV show.

Also: jeez, Good. Suggesting something like the novel concept of recruiting “smart women journalists” is so insulting it undermines your entire point.

Perhaps more women would jump at careers in sports journalism if they weren’t treated as novelties, as you’ve just done.