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Culture & Society

'Feminine' writing: the effect of gender on the work of women sports

journalists in the Swiss daily press
Lucie Schoch
Media Culture Society 2013 35: 708
DOI: 10.1177/0163443713491300
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491300
2013

MCS35610.1177/0163443713491300Media, Culture & SocietySchoch

Article

Feminine writing: the effect

of gender on the work of
women sports journalists
in the Swiss daily press

Media, Culture & Society

35(6) 708723
The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0163443713491300
mcs.sagepub.com

Lucie Schoch

University of Lausanne, Switzerland

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.
Keywords
feminization, gender, journalism, male dominance, sports, writing
As in most western societies, the number of women active in journalism in Switzerland
has risen steeply over the last three decades (Chambers etal., 2004; Gallagher 2001;
Neveu, 2000; Van Zoonen, 1994). In the French-speaking part of Switzerland that is the
Corresponding author:
Lucie Schoch, University of Lausanne, Quartier Unil-Mouline, Btiment Gopolis, Lausanne, 1015,
Switzerland.
Email: lucie.schoch@unil.ch

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Schoch

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 etal., 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 Aurlie) 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 etal. (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 USAs Title IX. Therefore, womens 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 womans 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

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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 ODonnell, 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; DamianGaillard 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

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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 etal., 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 etal., 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 etal., 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

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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 Libert 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 journalists 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 Annas 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

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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
wasnt the one stealing their job, far from it. I had my own stuff alongside, so it was
perfect (interview with Aurlie).

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 Frdric). 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

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Figure 1.Types of articles written by male and female journalists.

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 journalists 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).
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 Aurlie). 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

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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 Aurlie 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, La 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 captains 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. Sandrines article,
entitled The art of sailing from a womans 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

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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, womens 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

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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. Aurlie 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 wont 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 Aurlie:
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

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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 400 down
against a guy who was ranked below you. They dont 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 ones 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
wasnt 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%). Annas 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

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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 Ambrhl 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 Plss 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,
Annas 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

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Media, Culture & Society 35(6)

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 newspapers 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 etal., 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

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Figure 2.Tone of the articles by male and female journalists.

the organizations 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.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. We have been able to observe that the journalistic activities of men are not uniform and also
evolve. Nevertheless, a vast majority of male journalists adhere to the professional values of
their speciality, which they help define and maintain. Therefore, for the sake of convenience
and because this article focuses on female journalists we have used the term male journalists
without differentiating their ways of working or their output.
2. Each journalist specializes in one or more sports depending on the burden of work it requires
(this depends as much on the volume of news generated by this sport as on the importance the
newspaper gives to it).
3. Differences in output between men and women are very significant since the khi2 test shows
that p = 0% with an error margin of 5% for the comparisons in Figures 1 and 2 presented here.
4. There is no school of journalism in Francophone Switzerland and the classic path to becoming a professional journalist is to complete a professional internship of two years within a
media outlet. Sports journalists have similar educational trajectories to other journalists and it
is very rare that a former sports star retrains as a sports journalist.

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5.

Media, Culture & Society 35(6)

Almost all of our women respondents were active as freelancers during their university training and worked as non-remunerated interns during vacations, generally in the daily press
and usually for the culture, society, local or regional sections. They tend to be slightly better
educated than men (a trend which is true of the profession as a whole).

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