Speaking Up and Speaking Out: Collective Voice in Women’s Sports Media

Abstract

This qualitative textual analysis considers “voice” in a new sports media platform Just Women’s Sports. Using communicative injustice and collective voice as its theoretical framework, this study considers whose voices are represented in women’s sports media and how those voices are represented. The unique position of Just Women’s Sports as a news outlet independent from mixed-gender sports media outlets and funded by venture capital investments makes it an interesting case study to consider new avenues in sports media production. The findings of this study indicate that Just Women’s Sports’s voice consists of diverse women who promote an inclusive and activist community. Furthermore, this study provides a theoretical intervention in the study of women’s sports media by introducing communicative injustice as an informative theoretical lens.

On March 30, 2022, 91,553 fans poured into the stands of Camp Nou, the home stadium of soccer powerhouse FC Barcelona for a Champions League game between FC Barcelona Femení and Real Madrid Femenino. The 91,500+ fans broke the world record for attendance at a women’s soccer match and then, on April 22, 2022, two weeks after hosting their world record-breaking crowd, FC Barcelona Femení packed Camp Nou again, breaking their own record with 91,648 fans (Brennan, 2022a, 2022b).

As a feminist media studies researcher and a follower of women’s sports, when I wanted to read recaps of the FC Barcelona Femení games, I didn’t turn to ESPN or Bleacher Report. Those sites have failed me – and moreover, women’s sports – too many times. Instead, I turned to news outlets and social media accounts like Just Women’s Sports, On Her Turf, or espnW, which had been covering the entire Women’s Champions League run. Repeatedly, scholars have shown how mainstream sports media sites consistently underreport women’s sports (Bruce, 2016; Cooky et al., 2021). However, new digital media platforms intent on covering exclusively women’s sports are trying to lessen the disparity in coverage (Moran, 2020).

In this paper, I examine Just Women’s Sports (JWS), a relatively new voice in the digital sports media landscape. Through a qualitative textual analysis, this paper seeks to understand the “voice” of JWS as a sports media outlet without ties to a mainstream and mixed-gender outlet. By situating this work within the historical (and present) communicative injustices against women in sports media and using collective voice (Kay, 2020) as a theoretical framework, this study aims to evaluate the voice of an up-and-coming women’s sports media outlet.

Literature Review

Gendered Struggle for Power in Sports

The struggle for women’s representation in sports and sports media is intertwined with gendered power dynamics in sports, which have historically been built upon hegemonic masculinity, the “pattern of practice…that allow[s] men’s dominance over women to continue” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 832). Given patterns of practice within sport that have historically attempted to keep women on the sidelines, even the mere existence of women in sports “represents a genuine quest by women for control of their own bodies and self-definition, and as such, it represents a challenge to the ideological basis of male domination” (Messner, 1988, p. 198). Historically, fields of play constituted a “powerful arena for the perpetuation of the ideology of male superiority and dominance,” (Messner, 1988, p. 199) and existed as a male-only cultural sphere. For a woman to step onto a sports field or speak about sports was (and is) more than a reaction to the politics of gender relations; it was an active disturbance.

Fast forward to the 2010s, and women, particularly women of color, still endure harassment and abuse for competing in sports. For example, Litchfield et al.’s (2018) analysis of Facebook and Twitter during the 2015 Wimbledon Championship found that online users often questioned Serena William’s gender, accused her of using performance-enhancing drugs, and made racist comments about her. Kavanagh et al. (2016) found that social media have made it especially easy to attack athletes and identified four categories of virtual abuse: physical, sexual, emotional, and discriminatory. This physical and verbal resistance to women’s presence in sports translates to media and public speech as well, where sportswomen often remain silenced.

Gendered Struggle for Representation in Sports Media

At the high school, college, and professional levels, the number of women and girls competing in sports has been steadily increasing over time (National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2021; Petri, 2022; Staurowsky et al., 2020). Logically, the increasing number of women participating in sports, a “male-defined” space (Messner, 1988, p. 206), suggests an increasing number of women vying for time and space among male-defined sports media. However, an extensive body of literature on sports and gender representation points to the longstanding “marginalization, trivialization, ambivalence, and sexualization of sportswomen” (Bruce, 2016 p. 367).

In the 1990s, as women’s sports participation was rising, researchers wrote with excitement about an expected upcoming shift in gender parity in sports media; however, we have yet to see a significant increase in the amount of women’s sports coverage (Cooky et al., 2021; Fink, 2015). This theme of optimism appears in sports media literature every so often, typically around a major global sporting event (Cooky et al., 2021; Godoy-Pressland, 2014). Although coverage of women’s sports might seem improved in studies of major tournaments and events, episodic reporting does not accurately account for what routine coverage looks like. Cooky et al. (2021) found that in 2019, women’s sports news made up 5.1% of sports coverage on network TV news and 5.4% of sports news coverage online (p. 352). Furthermore, across both print and digital media, often sports reporting that does address women’s sports tended to cover sports deemed acceptably feminine for women, such as gymnastics, swimming, beach volleyball, diving, and track and field (Coche & Tuggle, 2016; Godoy-Pressland, 2014).

Struggling Around the Center

Messner (2002) proposes three strategies for sportswomen to fight for equal representation and move from the margins to the center of sports: the ghettoization model, the “Just Do It” model, and the social justice model. Under the ghettoization model, critical coverage of women’s sports exists on lesser-known, niche platforms. This model allows sportswomen to avoid patriarchal backlash, but it limits women’s sporting stories to marginal spaces. The Just Do It model advocates for complete equal opportunity for men’s and women’s sports. However, Messner (2002) critiques this model’s reliance on neoliberal individualism for success. In the context of sports media, the Just Do It model may provide equal opportunities for athletes to sign sponsorship deals; however, this could lead to privileged sportswomen (white, cisgender, straight women) joining a system that still oppresses those in the margins.

Finally, the social justice model attempts to find a balance between the two and “fights against the oppressive and unjust aspects of ghettoization at the same time as it recognizes that fundamental social critique and oppositional strategies can be forged from the margins” (Messner, 2002, p. 153). In the social justice model, athletes and journalists work towards equitable coverage while also critiquing and “fundamentally transforming the center of men’s sports” (Messner, 2002, p. 153).

News Startups as a Site for Change

A news startup is a news organization “that receives funding from an external source, such as investors or a larger company” (Carlson & Usher, 2016, p. 565). Many of these startups seek out funding from venture capital. Kosterich and Weber (2018) point out that venture-backed news organizations sometimes mold their work to the interests of their investors, but they and other scholars have also argued that news startups can foster innovation and challenge the norms and boundaries of journalism. Furthermore, news startups “establish legitimacy through critiquing and enforcing journalism” (Carlson & Usher, 2016, p. 569) and are dedicated to “collapsing the boundary between digital and journalistic innovation” (p. 572). Essentially, not only will these platforms create better journalism, but they will do so in a manner that has never been done before.

Messner (2002) would likely caution that a niche focus on women’s sports could lead to further ghettoization of women’s sports. However, this is where venture capital makes a difference. A well-resourced outlet would have the freedom to push for change within sports media while still operating within the boundaries of journalism writ large, thus operating under the social justice model.

Theoretical Framework

Communicative Injustice and Collective Voice

Kay (2020) defines “communicative injustice” as “the multiple ways in which women, as well as LGBTQ people, people of color, working-class people, disabled people, and other ‘others,’ are denied a voice that is sufficiently expansive, complex, and meaningful to allow them a position of full citizenship and personhood in contemporary culture” (p. 8). Kay suggests a historical link exists between communicative injustice, gendered norms of speech, and gender inequality that persists today. Contemporaneously, communicative injustice refers to the tension women experience when it comes to speech: “they are pulled in opposite directions by the contradictions of a culture that impels them to speak out, but which also punishes them for doing so” (Kay, 2020, p. 8). This is because, on one hand, social media presents women with unmatched opportunities for using their voices, yet they are still silenced and punished for speaking out. Take for example the simultaneous praise and pushback – particularly from Donald Trump – soccer player Megan Rapinoe received for using her social media presence, sponsorship decisions, and interviews to advocate for racial equality, LGBTQ issues, and equal pay (Everbach et al., 2021; Keh, 2019).

Kay (2020) argues that it may be true that “white, middle-class, non-disabled, cis-gendered and heterosexual women” (p. 8) experience cultural awkwardness when speaking or using their voices, but there is a range of other groups (for example, people of color, queer, and disabled folks) who risk worse, including violence for speaking out. This is dangerous because the ability to speak and participate in public debate is not only a tenet of full personhood (Kay, 2020), but also a requirement of women in a neoliberal culture that values popular feminism (Banet-Weiser, 2018). This is especially pertinent in the sports industry where women are expected to not only be athletes, but also role models for girls interested in sports (Bruce, 2016).

Those experiencing communicative injustices are tasked with speaking and given space to speak by the so-called democratization of voice through social media. But the reality is even if they are speaking, they are not listened to (Bassel, 2017; Couldry, 2010). For example, athletes in the WNBA frequently engage in on-court protests and social media movements, but their activist efforts are often overshadowed by similar statements from players in the men’s league (Cooky et al., 2021). For a voice to be effective, it is not enough for it to simply exist. It must carry value from the perspective of the listener (Couldry, 2010). Thus, the voices commanding attention are typically those of people in positions of power (white, straight men), who satisfy normative understandings of what constitutes confident, slick, charismatic speech (Kay, 2020).

In response to communitive injustice and to combat the denial of effective voice for marginalized individuals, Kay (2020) argues for a radical rethinking and revaluing of voice, based on collectivity. The notion of collective voice makes space for the “vulnerable, faltering, misfiring, awkward, and messy” (Kay, 2020, p. 174). It prioritizes utterances from a collective of women, queer people, people of color, and folks with disabilities rather than utterances made by one singular voice that assimilates into masculinist communication norms. Thus, according to Kay (2020), prioritizing collective voice is an inherently intersectional approach to combatting communicative injustice. Similar to Messner’s social justice model, Kay (2020) states that new arenas for speech must be formed with a promise to be inclusive of voices different from the ones monopolizing mainstream spaces.

Previous literature on women’s sports coverage has often employed analyses of mainstream, legacy news outlets. A smaller body of literature has considered how women’s sports blogs offer spaces for resistance (Antunovic & Hardin, 2012). This study uses collective voice as a lens for analysis of a niche news startup outlet and poses the following research questions:

RQ1: Whose voices are included and prioritized in women’s sports media content produced by Just Women’s Sports?

RQ2: What themes exist in the representation of athletes’ voices on Just Women’s Sports’ website?

Method

Utilizing Kay’s (2020) conceptualization of “voice” as an abstract concept encompassing written text, spoken word, and expressed opinions and attitudes, I analyzed the voice embedded in 20 news articles on justwomenssports.com from 2020 and 2021. My analysis operated on two levels: JWS as an outlet and the athletes’ voices that form the basis of the articles through interviews. In this sense, JWS’s voice would not be complete without the expressed thoughts of the featured athletes. Therefore, in my analysis, I focused especially on direct quotations in the articles.

Textual analysis allows researchers to analyze a text and make sense of the “social practices, representations, assumptions and stories” (Brennen, 2021, p. 213) that the text constitutes as reality. Textual analyses extend further than noting the presence of representation; they give insight into the meaning of representation within a text taking context into account (Brennen, 2021). This study utilizes an inductive approach grounded in the text itself to make sense of and prioritize the voice of the text.

Through a coding process consisting of initial and focused coding cycles, I considered themes in the coverage on JWS (Saldaña, 2021). Through a line-by-line coding of the articles, I used a mixture of coding techniques including In Vivo coding, emotion coding, and value coding. In Vivo codes are particularly useful in “studies that prioritize and honor the participant’s voice” because they preserve a speaker’s own words and phrasing (Saldaña, 2021, p. 138). In coding for emotion and values, I assessed the potential messiness or vulnerability present in the voices. Through analytic memo writing during the second round of coding, I sought out the themes present in the text and explain them in my findings and discussion.

Case Selection: Just Women’s Sports

Inspired by the viewership statistics from the 2019 FIFA World Cup, Haley Rosen launched Just Women’s Sports, an online-only sports-media platform that produces content that is “100% women’s sports, 100% of the time” (About, n.d., para. 1). The site covers women’s sports globally, but leans towards U.S. leagues, something which I will discuss a bit further in the findings. With the backing of US$9.5 million from venture capital investments, JWS has become the “fastest-growing media platform focused on women’s athletics today” (Doykos, 2021, para. 2) and is in the position to forge its own path in the sports media landscape (Tan, 2022; Withiam, 2021). So far, Rosen and her team have built a multimedia platform that has quadrupled its revenue and tripled its audience over its first full year online and boasts 26 million social impressions per month (Bacharach et al., 2022; Business Wire, 2022). As Rosen (2019, para. 13) wrote in an early post to the site, “We’re done waiting for old platforms to catch up. We’re building our own”. JWS is still in its infancy; however, viewing it as a model for the future of women’s sports journalism provides an opportunity to consider how niche platforms can operate alongside mainstream sports media outlets, but still “push the space forward” (Rosen, 2021, para. 18).

Sample

JWS publishes new articles daily, so I used a sample of stories from the website to generate a manageable dataset. The sample consists of 10 articles randomly chosen from 2020 and ten articles randomly chosen from 2021. To gather instances of daily coverage (as called for by Cooky et al., 2021), I generated a list of every story published on JWS in 2020 and randomly chose 10. 2021 saw an increase in the volume of stories on the site. Rather than creating a list of each story published in 2021, I randomly selected 10 days of the year and pulled one article from those days. The final sample consists of a variety of article types, something I discuss in my findings.

Findings

Prioritizing Diverse Voices

A simple question started my analysis of the JWS content: whose voices are included and prioritized? This question is important in that it evaluates the diversity (or lack thereof) of voices represented on the site. As could be expected on a news site that has branded itself as a platform focused on “100% women’s sports, 100% of the time” (About, n.d.), women’s voices lead in most of the articles within the scope of this paper. All but one of the articles featured a woman or a women’s sporting event as the primary focus of the story. Eight out of the 20 articles included long quotes from sportswomen, often in the form of in-depth interviews but also including two first-person essays. In the case of the interviews, the players’ voices comprised most of the text other than an occasional question from the interviewer. For example, in one interview, USA Softball player Haley McCleney’s responses made up 1234 words out of the 1502-word story.

The other articles (news briefs and event recaps) served as updates on tournament news, injury reports, or general announcements of the goings-on in women’s sports and included fewer direct representations of voice through quoting. However, in these articles, the writers amplified women’s voices and experiences by promoting both their sporting events and their other projects. A news story on WNBA star Candace Parker’s new podcast “Moments with Candace Parker” illustrated this amplification of voice. The article included a brief announcement of the podcast, a quote from Parker, and a link to her podcast so that readers can audibly listen to her voice. This linking of information and amplifying of women’s voices in sports is one way that JWS satisfies its mission to make women’s sports and thus women’s voices in sports more accessible to fans.

An outlier in the sample of stories otherwise about women in sports, one of the articles was a first-person essay in memory of Kobe Bryant written by Rosen. “It didn’t matter that I was a young girl playing soccer,” Rosen wrote. “He was still a role model, someone who taught me and many others that if you want to be great, there’s no such thing as doing too much” (2020a, para. 4). Rosen framed her story within the context of Bryant’s influence on her personal growth as an athlete and his support of the women’s sporting community. She praised Bryant’s support and encouragement of his teenaged daughter Gigi, who aspired to be in the WNBA. This article simultaneously envisions a future of women’s success in sports and memorializes the career of Kobe Bryant. It does not necessarily cover just women’s sports, but rather suggests an easing of the border between men’s and women’s sports when a legendary player dies.

Outlier aside, the voices present in the selected JWS articles made up a diverse group of women who participate in various roles and levels of sports. The articles featured the voices of women of color who shared their experiences in homogenous spaces. Sarah Gorden, a professional soccer player in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), self-identified as a “mixed woman with a Black son” (Shaw, 2020b, para. 6) in an interview on the site. In the interview, she said, “It feels like, as a Black girl, you have to work twice as hard to be called a ‘technical’ player” (Shaw, 2020b, para. 8). Imani Dorsey, a board member of the Black Women’s Player Collective, said in a JWS interview that soccer is a “predominantly white space” (Louie, 2020, para. 24). In a feature article, high schooler Lauren Betts spoke about her experience feeling othered at her “very non-diverse school” (Laase, 2021, para. 89) for both her race and her 6′7″ height. Gorden, Dorsey, and Betts all identified as women of color in the articles that featured them, but other articles included stories from women of color, as well. Out of this twenty-article sample, 10 of the articles prominently featured the voices of women of color, and three prominently featured the voices of white women; the remaining seven either focused on an event rather than an individual athlete or did not include quotes.

Also present in the articles were the voices of publicly queer athletes, athletes with physical disabilities, athletes who are also mothers, and college and high school athletes. Most of the articles covered sports in the United States, but a few captured the “global snapshot of women in sports” (Murray, 2020b, para. 3), featuring quotes from non-American athletes and promoting global sporting competitions. Finally, these JWS stories did not give platforms to athletes’ voices only. The stories also included quotes from women who are coaches, spokespeople for nonprofit organizations, team owners, and global representatives.

Mediating Voice Through Article Format

This study also sought to understand how voice is represented in women-focused sports media. The findings for this question can be interpreted on two levels. Broadly speaking, JWS presented diverse voices in a variety of article formats. Each format (interview, first-person essay, feature article, event recap, and news brief) afforded different amounts of space and agency to the women’s voices.

The first-person essays and interviews granted the most space and freedom for the athletes to express their voices. In the essays, we see the writers take the space to process their own emotions and identity. For example, Casey Maggiore, a college softball player wrote in her first-person essay:

As an athlete, sexual preference, gender identity, and emotional hardship don’t follow you to the court or the field. When I was at practice, the world was simple. All that mattered was the next rep, the next play, and the unity of working together with a team. (Maggiore, 2020, para. 9)

The essay format allowed Maggiore to explain to readers in her own words how softball helped her feel at home in her queer body.

Similarly, the in-depth interviews presented paragraph-long quoted segments from the athletes rather than short quotes or paraphrases. The interviews maintained a consistent format in their headlines that centered around the featured athlete. For example, two of the interview headlines were “Haylie McCleney Talks Olympics Delay and Softball’s Future” (Shaw, 2020c), and “Stanford’s Haley Jones on Adjusting to College, Coming Back from Injury” (Wilson, 2020). The construction of these headlines, [name] + [speaking verb] + [topic] placed emphasis on the athlete as a valuable epistemological source and provided them ownership of their position and rhetoric.

Conversely, the news briefs afforded far less space to the voices of the women they discuss and stand in stark difference from the lengthy and often emotion-filled interviews and first-person essays. For example, one news brief reporting on basketball player Diana Taurasi’s injury status was only 93 words long and included this short quote from Taurasi: “That’s the plan…I’m checking all the boxes and hopefully will be ready” (Hruby, 2021b). Moreover, the news briefs often utilized team or league announcements, media releases, or tweets from other news outlets as sources rather than athletes’ quotes. For example, one line in an article on Sha’Carri Richardson’s participation in a track and field meet simply stated, “The Diamond League meet organizers announced [Richardson’s] participation Monday, saying that the sprinter will compete in the 100 and 200-meter events” (Hruby, 2021a, para. 2). Both the paraphrasing of information and attribution to the meet organizers obscured the individual voice behind the information.

Individual Voices Making up JWS’s Voice

The second level of observation in evaluating how JWS represented voice encompassed an analysis of the individual athletes’ voices present in the quotations. I considered if and how Kay’s (2020) components of collective voice were present in these quotes, and two themes emerged in how the individual voices functioned within the articles: acknowledgment of communicative injustice, and expression of emotion and values.

Acknowledgment of Communicative Injustices

Within the articles, it was not uncommon for the athletes and other quoted individuals to meta-discursively acknowledge the communicative injustices women face in sports. In a response to an interviewer’s question about her take on “using [her] platform to drive [social justice] conversations,” (Louie, 2020, para. 14) Dorsey responded with frustration:

When I do share, I feel like I want to know that people are listening. And for a long time, I felt like people just didn’t want to hear that from me because in their eyes it’s just like, “Oh. It’s just another Black person talking about issues that they feel are affecting them.” I feel like, not that I’ve had to be silent about it, but just that the people who were going to listen were going to listen, and the others just didn’t care or chose not to listen. (Louie, 2020, para. 16)

Without using the term “communicative injustice,” Dorsey described the tensions involved in communicative injustice. Why speak if no one is going to listen? In the same breath, Dorsey goes on to stress the importance of being able to speak with the Black Players Collective. “It just brings so much more legitimacy and power knowing that you have the rest of the Black players in this league with you speaking in one unified voice” (Louie, 2020, para. 19).

Although perhaps not as clearly as Dorsey, other athlete sources in the articles acknowledged the silencing effects of communicative injustice as well. Underlying many of the conversations around social justice, advocacy, and identity representation was a sense of responsibility to “use [their] voices” and take advantage of the platform they have as athletes (Rosen, 2020b, para. 22). For example, in two of the articles, Gorden and Parker promoted the visibility of mothers in professional sports. Similarly, a newsletter editor quoted in one of the articles noted the need for effective voices among diverse populations. “Malala Fund really believes that girls are not only the leaders of tomorrow,” said Thomas, “but the leaders of today and their voices and opinions need to be heard and need to be a part of the global conversation” (Murray, 2020b, para. 19). Among the stories, there is a common sense of a need for athletes to “push for critical social change within their own communities” (Murray, 2020b, para. 5), and one way to do that is to make their voices heard.

Furthermore, in the articles, the concept of speaking out was not an individual act, but a collective one that includes people with different beliefs and identities. Dorsey commented on this when talking about coalitions and allyship in advocacy:

It’s super important for people who aren’t directly affected by an issue to speak up on it if they feel it is important…Whether it’s a white person speaking up and bringing legitimacy to Black issues that Black players face or me, as a cis straight woman speaking up on LGBTQ issues. (Louie, 2020, para. 39)

Gorden echoed Dorsey’s sentiments, noting “It’s been great to see a lot of [her] white teammates speak up, and say these things, and get uncomfortable. That’s exactly what we need” (Shaw, 2020b, para. 6). In response to an interviewer’s question about kneeling during the national anthem, soccer player Lynn Williams spoke about her team’s efforts to make united statements. Although not everyone chose to kneel, Williams said the team still agreed to make a unified statement against “police brutality and the social injustices that minorities in this country face” (Rosen, 2020b, para. 22). According to Dorsey, Gorden, and Williams, a unified voice against racial injustice encompasses white players and Black players, although they do not necessarily share all the same beliefs or experiences.

Expression of Emotions and Values

Secondly, within the articles, the women used their voices to both express and process their emotions and share their values. Take for example Maggiore’s essay about the role sports played in her coming out process. She shared her emotional experiences when coming out to herself and then to her friends, family, and teammates through the narrative of the essay. She recounted her initial feelings of fear, anxiety, and shame as well as her ultimate sense of pride and comfort within her own skin. Maggiore vulnerably shared her story while also providing an opportunity for other queer readers to find community in her experiences.

The articles also provided space for the women to express their negative and unresolved emotions about their current circumstances at the time in 2020 and 2021. A group of college athletes spoke about feeling “heartbroken” and “devastated” as they learned they would not be able to finish out their seasons due to COVID-19 (Shaw, 2020a). Professional tennis player Naomi Osaka noted her anxiety over possibly playing in an Olympics amid a global health crisis. WNBA player Chennedy Carter tweeted her frustration with the Atlanta Dream, her team at the time, for her indefinite suspension, and Gorden spoke about her frustration with the stereotypical comments announcers make when covering Black athletes.

When it comes to values sharing, many of the athletes spoke about the importance of community and building a successful life both inside and outside of sports. The importance of community was strikingly clear in the articles on college athletic seasons cut short and professional tournament cancellations. Two of the athletes said they tried to do everything they could to “stick together” (Shaw, 2020a, paras. 12, 14) despite being separated physically, and Stanford basketball player Haley Jones told readers about the scheduled virtual hangouts she and her teammates were doing to maintain team spirit. Haylie McCleney said, that in softball “it’s not necessarily always about talent, but it’s about how a group of 18 can work together” (Shaw, 2020c, para. 8). Rosen made a similar point in her eulogy of Kobe Bryant, noting that it was Kobe’s “relationships rather than his records that would allow him to continue to change the game well after his playing days were through” (2020a, para. 13).

The emphasis on community building coincided with the athletes’ valuing of building success both in and outside of sports. On the field, the women wanted to create an environment where they could perform at the highest possible level. They spoke about prioritizing both physical health and financial security. In terms of physical safety and health, multiple articles and athletes discussed COVID-19 concerns and testing protocols. Regarding financial security, the athletes spoke about their desire to generate more opportunities for up-and-coming players. In a story on the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF), members of the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) stated that the current offerings of their league are “not the opportunities that we want for our younger players or for future generations of girls who will play this game at the highest level” (Murray, 2020a, para. 8). The PWHPA’s comment about playing at the highest level was transient across the stories on college athletes or recruits in these articles. Stanford basketball player Haley Jones laid out her “non-negotiable criteria when choosing a school” (Wilson, 2020, para. 14), and current college athletes lamented the fact that COVID-19 would likely cause a dip in performance.

Along with a devotion to top-level athletic opportunities, the article revealed a sense that the athletes’ core values extend “well beyond the field” (Murray, 2020b, para. 18). When talking about life outside of sports, a recurring theme in the athletes’ stories was the importance of family. Whether it was professional-athlete mothers talking about their children or current athletes reflecting on their parents’ support, the athletes’ families emerged as prominent influences on the women’s athletic success and personal well-being. For example, Betts told readers that if it weren’t for her mother’s encouragement, she wouldn’t have started counseling to help her cope with bullying. “Those [counseling meetings] have taken me so far,” Betts said, “and I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for reaching out to people” (Laase, 2021, para. 41).

Also important beyond just the world of sports, the athletes valued advocacy. One of the themes in their advocacy pursuits was the empowerment of young girls in sports. The athletes noted the importance of sportswomen as “role model[s]” (Brennan, 2021, para. 4; Wilson, 2020, para. 7) and leaders of the next generation because with “skills come responsibilities” (Laase, 2021, para. 84). The athletes valued social justice causes and shared their passions for fighting for equality, as well. Maggiore wrote that she wanted to “build a more accepting and generous world” (2020, para. 21) for LGBTQ folks and told the story of a Pride Games event that she hosted at her university. Gorden called out the racism present in soccer and spoke about a conversation she had with her club owner to ask how they can work together to “change things here” (Shaw, 2020b, para. 9). Dorsey called for allyship across identities and described her work with Athlete Ally to advocate for the transgender community. And finally, the athletes sponsored by the Malala Fund advocated for visibility for athletes with physical disabilities through various projects in their local communities.

Discussion

Throughout this discussion, I want to be careful not to imply that the existence alone of diverse stories and voices might “solve” the decades-long communicative injustices against women in sports media. Kay (2020) warns against this approach and states that “we should not simply try to get more women speaking publicly, to ‘empower’ or ‘train’ women up so that their voices are more ‘effective’” (p. 12). Rather, I argue that JWS’s explicit mission to build a news outlet that values women and other athletes of marginalized genders coupled with the athletes’ voices embedded in the content act in direct opposition to mainstream sports media’s “masculinist cultural center” (Messner, 2002, p. 92). JWS is not just “training up” more women to speak effectively; rather, it is operating under Messner’s social justice model and is developing a collective voice and building something separate from the traditional masculinist sports media. JWS’s status as a news startup allows it to brush up against the boundaries of the masculine center of sports media while simultaneously staying true to its mission to produce sports media focused on women’s experiences. Therefore, assisted by the support of its backers, JWS is actively centering women and varied representations of femininity in its discussions of sport.

One characteristic of collective voice is a radical revaluing of speech that makes room for the voices of those who have typically been excluded from mainstream public spheres, many of whom have been excluded due to intersecting axes of oppression (Kay, 2020). This study found that JWS’s sourcing patterns and article topics aligned with this characteristic of collective voice. In the sampled articles, JWS prioritized diverse voices and provided a platform for women to share their stories regardless of race, sexuality, ability, sport, or experience level (professional vs. amateur).

The voices of athletes of color were especially prominent in the sample of stories, with many of the in-depth interviews centered on the stories of women of color. These findings add nuance to the research exposing the misogynoir typically present in mainstream coverage of Black women in sports (e.g., Litchfield et al., 2018). One reason for this could be the timing of JWS’s launch in 2020. Both Dorsey and Gorden, the two athletes who spoke the most openly about the need to advocate for racial justice alongside their teammates, noted that more teammates and friends had been reaching out and asking them to share their experiences as women of color in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and resulting Black Lives Matter protests. These instances stand in line with the societal push “listen to Black women” in today’s post-election of Donald Trump society (Steele, 2021). Furthermore, Dorsey and Gorden’s comments point to the intersecting discrimination they have faced not only as sportswomen, but also as athletes of color.

To make room for voices that mainstream outlets typically exclude from public speech, collective voice encompasses voices that are messy, vulnerable, awkward, and different from each other (Kay, 2020). This study’s findings also point to the range of emotionality across the articles, illustrating the vulnerability of the athletes and the “messiness” of the collective voice of the site. Regardless of the length or depth of the articles, the athletes often discussed personal topics or expressed grief, disappointment, and frustration. The athletes themselves were vulnerable in sharing their experiences of racial injustice, fears of homophobia, and struggles with mental health. Moreover, taken as a whole, these stories present a varied compilation of articles on women’s sports. In some articles, the women are angry and disappointed, and in others, they express gratitude and speak of inspiration and the pride that comes with growing visibility and representation.

As evidenced by the findings, the in-depth interviews and personal essays provided the most space and agency for the athletes to fully explain and process their emotions. These findings shed further light on how sportswomen represent themselves through digital media – albeit within essays and long-form quotes rather than social media (Thorpe et al., 2017). Important to note though, is that the presence of the news briefs is also important to JWS’s mission to provide consistent every day coverage of women’s sporting events – something that mainstream sports outlets still do not do (Cooky et al., 2021). The ability to discern which type of article is most common across the site lies outside the scope of this qualitative study. Regardless, the range of article formats and the varied feelings, beliefs, and experiences shared within the stories illustrate JWS as a site that tells a diverse and multifaceted story.

The athletes’ acknowledgment of communicative injustice and the values they promoted through their interviews also suggested how JWS might be changing the communicative landscape in sports media. Kay (2020) warns against simplistic encouragements for individual women to speak up and speak out, but in this case, speaking out collectively became a practice that enabled women of color in professional soccer to effectively advocate for change and create the Black Players Collective (Louie, 2020). Speaking out is something that they do with their teammates rather than alone. In sharing their stories and encouraging others to do so, the athletes showed how an inclusive community is integral to success in a women’s sporting environment, and JWS’s voice reflected this inclusive community.

The values that the athletes promoted on JWS diverge from findings in previous studies of mainstream sports media, showcasing the way JWS is pushing the boundaries of sports media. For one, the emphasis on family in these stories was not used to detract from the women’s athletic ability as previous studies have shown (Bruce, 2016; Fink, 2015). Instead, it provided context to the stories of women who live full lives both on and off the court. This leaves me to wonder if JWS’s singular focus on women’s sports affords it the space to tell multiple types of stories. Also, in contrast with Cooky et al.’s (2021) finding that sportswomen are rarely recognized for their social justice work, social justice, activism, and advocacy for a variety of causes were prominent among the stories. Continued evaluation of the themes among content created by outlets like JWS will help to build theory and research on specifically women’s sports media outlets.

JWS operates as a niche platform, one that is a women’s sports media outlet independent from a larger mixed-gender sports media outlet. As it states on its website, JWS can wholeheartedly direct its attention and resources toward covering women’s sports. In doing so, it brings women to the center of sports media and promotes the voices of individuals who are actively seeking to change the longstanding disparities in sports coverage among genders. This paper sought to understand what characteristics make up the voice of a women’s sports media outlet with special attention to its collectivity. It sought to build scholarship that does not engage directly in a comparative study between men’s and women’s sports media but instead considers women’s sports media as a central actor in the larger sports media landscape.

This study is exploratory in nature, and it is beyond the scope of this one paper to analyze patterns in voice across all women’s sports media outlets or even all the stories on this single website. However, JWS is a prominent voice in women’s sports media, making it a worthwhile case study example to picture the future of women’s sports media (Doykos, 2021). In part due to its status as a news start-up, JWS is able to operate within a sports media landscape that has long been structured by hegemonic masculinity while also staying true to its mission to give full attention to women’s sports. The findings of this project suggest that Just Women’s Sports enacts a collective voice that is building a sports media landscape that centers on a diverse group of women. Given the site’s infancy, further study should continue to evaluate the voice of JWS and its contemporaries, such as The GIST and Power Plays. Furthermore, given the increasing visibility of nonbinary and transgender athletes, future research should consider if and how sites like Just Women’s Sports are inclusive of transgender women and nonbinary athletes who compete in women’s sporting competitions.