Last week FFJ founder Lily Canter found herself inadvertently reporting via a female lens in a male dominated field. Here she discusses why this is important and how it doesn’t go far enough.
As anyone who follows me on Instagram will know, I’m a little obsessed with running. To date my ragtag portfolio career has been a bit of a fractured identity crisis as I have been working as a freelance money journalist-cum-lecturer-cum-running coach. But a rebrand a few months ago is already paying dividends and everything feels as if it is coming together much like the final few weeks of a running training plan.
One opportunity to recently come my way was to look after the Runner’s World UK website and social media channels whilst a member of staff was on holiday. Although this was shift work, it was super flexible so I could fit it around running training, school runs and general life juggling.
During my week covering the website I wrote several news stories, SEO-led features and scheduled social posts. Working alongside me was an editorial team of three men and one woman. Having previously written commissioned articles for the magazine and being a subscriber for several years, I was aware that the team makes a conscious effort to provide diverse content. Indeed the front cover is more often than not a woman despite it not being Women’s Running magazine and there are a number of regular contributors from diverse ethic backgrounds.
But that being said the world of running is still very much dominated by men particularly when it comes to race publicity and participation, something which Team GB ultrarunner Sophie Power is addressing head on with her SheRACES campaign. Emma Wilkinson and I have experienced the feeling many times on the start line of a race that we are vastly outnumbered as a sex. This is particularly the case in the more extreme events we do - the land of ultra-running - where female participation can be as low as 10%. This is despite the fact that women can actually beat men at crazy long distances. I know that when I take part in a 50 mile race this weekend (eek!) I am going to be surrounded by men.
This all obviously feeds back into the representation of women in the running press. So when I suddenly found myself in a position of mild editorial power I couldn’t help but push the female agenda. At first this was completely inadvertently but as the week went on I realised it was becoming a conscious decision. By the end of my cover I noticed all of my story sources and case studies were female.
I wrote about twin girls, aged 10, who are currently ranked number one on Race Britain. I wrote about a women breaking her own consecutive half marathon record. I wrote about how to run with a dog on a lead and spoke to a female canicross expert and used a picture of woman. I wrote about how to fit running shoes properly and spoke to a female podiatrist.
And when it came to a story about Eilish McColgan and Sir Mo Farah winning the Big Half London I led with McColgan in the headline and intro rather than Farah, despite the BBC and other mainstream media leading with Farah. I wondered whether the sub editor checking my work would change it. But he didn’t. And suddenly I felt vindicated. Why shouldn’t the headline read ‘The Big Half: Wins for McColgan and Farah’ rather than ‘Wins for Farah and McColgan’? It may seem like a really small thing but without these semantic changes women athletes will never be perceived as deserving equal coverage as men.
McColgan is arguably a bigger name in athletics at the moment, setting British records for 5k and 10k this year, and hugely popular amongst runners and spectators. She won the women’s race, just as Farah won the men’s race, so it made sense to me to put her name first. And yet we hardly ever see this. Which made me want to do it even more.
In fact for the rest of the week I mentioned her as often as possible (and she even liked one of my personal tweets on Instagram much to my fangirl delight). In a Runner’s World Twitter and Facebook post about training for a half marathon I hooked it onto McColgan’s Big Half win. And you know what? It got far more views than any other post that week (bar another post about McColgan deferring her London Marathon place).
That’s not to say I didn’t cover news stories which involved men winning races (such as Jake Wightman winning the 800m). These obviously need to be reported too. But I did embrace my implicit bias. I am female and my circle of friends, fellow-runners and contacts are largely female. As a result I come across more female running stories than male. But in a field with over representation of men I actually think this is a good thing. And you don’t have to be an editor or a big name journalist to do this. We can all do it via our source selection process and the way in which we write our headlines/intros/copy. It just takes a conscious effort to challenge the normal way of doing things.
But that doesn’t mean it goes far enough. When analysing my sources I realised that every single one was white. I might have been flying the female flag but relying on my own networks meant I was still under representing large swathes of the diverse running community. So whilst implicit bias can be a force for good it is still vital that we move beyond our own echo chambers and seek voices that are different to ourselves.
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Triumph of the week
Managing to juggle a new routine at the start of the school year whilst meeting a ton of deadlines.
That feeling when
You turn up for an online meeting and you are not sure if you already have the gig or this is actually the interview for it.
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Bye for now!