Internet Marketing Bachelor's degree
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[intro music playing] - good afternoon, everyone,delighted you're here. i'm liz cohen. i'm dean of the radcliffeinstitute for advanced study. and i want to expressa special welcome to the alumnae who are herefor the first harvard women's weekend. and thank you to theharvard alumni association and other alumni organizers forbringing everyone together here
today and for therest of the weekend. it's a pleasure to welcome youall to this panel discussion on sports marketing,gender, and society. and i should say that whenwe planned this event, we knew that we were addressingan important and timely topic. but revelations this weekabout harvard men's soccer team and the harvard women'ssoccer team response that was published inthe harvard crimson has made it very clear thatthis topic was timely, indeed.
at the radcliffe institutefor advanced study, we convene scholars,policymakers, scientists, and artists around many topics. they come from allover harvard university and around the globe towork across disciplines and at the forefrontof their fields. we are also committedto sharing new knowledge and thought provokingconversation and discussion, like the one we will havetoday, with a very broad public.
and we retain breadthof colleges' commitment to the study of women andgender through one of our core programs, theschlesinger library on the history ofamerican women, and through much ofour other programming. for example, every yearwe hold a conference that examines a pressing issuethrough the lens of gender. last year's conference wasentitled ways with words, exploring language and gender.
and the year before that it wascalled confronting violence. i hope that manyof you will return for this year'sconference, which is entitled game changers,sports, gender, and society. it will begin on the eveningof thursday, april 6th and then continue allthrough the next day, friday, april 7th. and you could say that today'sevent panel is in many ways a preface to that largerconference in april.
the entire april conference,like many of our programs, will be live streamedand available afterwards on our website. so if you can't getback to cambridge, you can still enjoy it. today we are delightedto host this panel in the knafel center, a placewith a distinctly athletic history. until 1977, thisbuilding was a gymnasium
for the women ofradcliffe college. students ran laps around thetrack that's above our heads. they climbed ropes,and you can see some of the scars of muchof the gym equipment. and they formed theirown basketball team starting in 1895,long before they had access to theleagues, the uniforms, and the other resources thatharvard men took for granted. certainly, much has changed.
but damaging socialattitudes persist, and not just among the membersof the harvard men's soccer team. female competitors continue toexercise their athletic talents to less acclaim and forsmaller financial rewards than their male counterparts do. advertising providesa revealing window into these stubborn prejudices. take for instance, one ofthe most enduring and iconic
examples of sports marketing. wheaties has been featuringathletes on their cereal boxes since 1934. in the very first year of thisnow classic marketing strategy, a woman did appear on the box. she was eleanor smith, a pilot,who remains the only person to have flown a plane under allfour bridges of new york's east river. unfortunately, smithturned out to be an outlier
in more ways than one. it would be 50 yearsbefore wheaties featured another woman. in 1984, and many ofyou will remember this, when olympic gymnast,mary lou retton, appeared on thefamiliar orange box, children could finallysee a celebration of female athleticism as theyate their breakfast cereal. three decades later, i'mglad to say that women
do appear on wheaties boxes. and two women have even madeit onto forbes magazine's list of the highest paid athletes. but female athletescontinue to face disparities in pay, in endorsementdeals, and in media coverage. in 2014, only 2% ofsports center air time covered women's sports. and a recent lawsuit bythe us women's soccer team revealed that someprofessional male soccer
players are paid four times morethan their female counterparts. the multi-faceted issueof women in sports is best addressed frommultiple perspectives, which is why we have broughttogether this very fine group of panelists today. their discussionwill be moderated by janet ridge edwards. janet is the faculty director ofradcliffe's biological science programming, and one of the twoorganizers of the game changers
conference about genderand sports that i mentioned will be coming up in april. janet is a radcliffe alumand an epidemiologist with dual appointments atthe harvard medical school and the harvard t.h. chanschool of public health. she currently serves as directorof developmental epidemiology at the connor's center forwomen's health and gender biology at brighamand women's hospital. so please join me nowin welcoming janet.
[applause] thank you, liz, andwelcome everybody. this is a great turnout. i want to just start byputting a little bit more of a plug for thatapril conference. because we hope tolure you all back here. we're going tohave three panels. the first one onwho gets to play. talking about issues ofgender, race, class, ability,
and who gets to play. we're going to have donnalopiano come, the former ceo of the women'ssports foundation, as well as past president of theassociation for intercollegiate athletics for women. and we're going to havestephanie wheeler, who won gold in the women'swheelchair basketball in both athens and beijing,and is now the head coach for the women's team.
we will also have a panelon gender sports, health, and wellness. and that will feature,among others, travis tygart, who's ceo of the usanti-doping agency, which should prove interesting. and then we'll have apanel on gender, media, and popular culture. we'll have speakers onmasculinity in sports. we'll have somesports journalists,
and we'll talk abouttransnational issues. and for our keynoteaddress, we're going to have laila alicome talk, both about her experience as an athlete,but also how that translates. issues of femininity, whatyou're allowed to say. and i think it'll be a reallystimulating discussion on that. i want to take a second to talkabout the elephant in the room on this campus this week. i imagine most of you haveheard about the-- i don't even
know what to call it. well, first of all thegeneral counsel's review of the sexually explicitand vulgar scouting report put together by the2012 men's soccer team and i gather from the presscoverage that has continued. the women who weretargeted in this report have written a brilliant andpowerful op-ed in response to this scouting report. and if you haven't readit, i encourage you to.
it's really quite inspiring. and if you just googlewomen's soccer harvard op-ed, you'll find it. this morning, i think it was,bill littlefield commented on their powerfulletter in response to the witless cruelty ofthe original attack on them. i want to quote a littlebit from this op-ed because i reallyfound it impressive. the women say, and this is thesix women writing together,
"this document attempts topit us against one another, as if the judgment of a fewmen is sufficient to determine our worth. but men, we knowbetter than that. 18 years of soccertaught us that. 18 years as successful,powerful, and undeniably brilliant femaleathletes taught us that." and they go on to say, "we'rehopeful that the release of this report will leadto productive conversation
and action on harvard's campuswithin collegiate athletic teams across the country,and into the locker room that is our world." and i'm pleased to say that'swhat we're here to do today. let me introduce to youour three panelists. first, we havejessica gellman, who is the ceo-- yeah, come on up,thank you-- of kraft analytics group, which isfocused on the data management, advanced analytics,and strategic marketing
for the kraft family business. she's been there 15 years. the krafts, ofcourse, as the owners of the new england patriots,gillette stadium, and the new england revolution. her responsibilities thereinclude business operations, customer marketing,and strategy. so look at her to talk aboutthe gendered aspects of that. she, i'm also pleased to say,was harvard female athlete
of the year after leadingharvard's women's basketball teams two consecutive ivyleague and ncaa tournament appearances. and has been cited by boththe sports business journal and sports businessjournal-- so it was twice by the sport's businessjournal as a game changer. then we'll have danpeterson-- come on up, dan-- who is currentlythe director of content at admithub, an ed tech startup.
he's also written and editedfor espn boston for eight years, covered world cup, andmanaged sports news coverage for the local espn sitesin boston, chicago, dallas, la, and new york. and he's very interestedin changing the way we talk about women's sports. the amount of coverageand what we do cover when we coverfemale athletes. and then finally,shira springer,
who writes a column on women'ssports for the boston globe and covers sports and societyfor both npr and wbur. her coverage of theceltics, the nba, has earned her awards from theassociated press sports editors for investigative andexplanatory journalism. and also from thewomen's sports foundation for her future writing. she's covered all of boston'smajor professional sports teams, as well as the bostonmarathon, olympics, local
and national college athletics. she's appeared on numerous espnprograms, msnbc, cnn, and npr. and i can say she is aboutto run the new york marathon, i think, not for thefirst time, this sunday. so please welcome our panelists. what we'll do is we'll giveeverybody about ten minutes to give their perspective. we'll have a little bit ofa discussion between us. and then we'll open up thefloor for your comments
and questions. will we have a mic? at that point. ok, great. - hi. good afternoon, everyone. so this is great. this is really fun to be here. do we have anypatriots fans here?
[cheering] ok, good. i like to see that. so i'm going to provide alittle perspective about how we think about marketingand specifically, the steps that we have taken, i guessover the last ten years, to market to women and startto reach that fan base. the krafts have alwaysbeen incredibly forward thinking aboutunderstanding our customers
and thinking aboutour customers. and so we started to makevery significant investments in the early 2000s when we werereally winning our first super bowls. and i think just to tryand get that single view of our customer acrossour organization, i think those investmentsthat we were making then we weren't reallynecessarily thinking, how is this going toimpact women and how we
think about marketing to women? but as we started getting all ofthis data about our customers, their opens, theirclicks in emails, where they're purchasing, whatthey were purchasing, tickets, concerts, what products theywere purchasing at the patriots pro shops or online, or whateverthe different things and how fans were engaging with us. we started to get abetter understanding of who we were serving andwho we weren't serving.
so our approach, i'll giveyou just a quick overview of how we think aboutmarketing during my time with specificallythe sports group. and then theefforts that we have done it's impactedus very positively, ultimately, such that we spunout the kraft analytics group. the kraft sports group is stillan area that we, as a client, i guess i would call it. but we sit down in the stadiumand i do have a super bowl ring
here from a couple years ago. so you guys can come getpictures after if you'd like. but our approach to marketingis something called behavior based marketing, which we havebeen doing for seven years. but it's very common now,it wasn't seven years ago. but it's all thestuff that you hear about on facebookand google, which is we're looking atthe actual behaviors that our customers take andaltering our communication
and messaging. and/or we're trying to predictwhat actions they might take or that might be negativeto us and that we might want to changethrough our messaging. so we're trying tomake them, obviously, more loyal, more engaged. or, if they're newto our organization, how do we definethat they're going to be a great customer orsomeone who might quickly
fall out as a customer. so we think aboutthis through what we call the three cs, whichis channel, consumption, and content. so the channel is directmail, email, phone, and how can we leveragethe different mechanisms and technology thatare out there today to better communicate. what has happened reallyspecifically for us
in the past sevenor eight years, but then more at a microlevel in the past three to four years, is thatone to one marketing. so everyone kind ofunderstands channel. consumption is the waythat you're actually getting the content. so obviously, therewas a big shift. many of you guys will reademails on your phone today. three or four yearsago we were just
starting to see thatshift from people reading on their computers toreading on their phones or on apps or on social media. and i think forall of you to think about how we have altered thedesign of our communications for people to be able tomore easily read emails if it's on their phoneversus at their desk. and then the last component isthe actual content or product. so the content inour case is it could
be about the patriotsteam specifically, the x's and o's of what'shappening on the field. which i would say wasa huge focus for us for a very long timein investing in people. like what shira wasdoing with the celtics many, many yearsago to understand what happened in the game. but again, it wasn'treally the softer side. so as we were sendingout communications
and we were getting moredetails on what people were reading andweren't reading, and who was clickingon what, we definitely identified anunder-served market, which was obviouslywomen, which is what i'm going to talk about now. so we began about fiveyears ago a process to understand how wecould better engage women. and we did a bunchof research, we
looked at what otherorganizations in sports were doing. and we saw, forexample, that the ravens had created a specificclub that had events. we ultimatelydecided that wasn't the avenue we wanted to go. and we got a bunch of peoplein a room, men, women, different ages,and we just started talking about what iscontent that we don't think
is out there. and ultimately, we cameup with this concept called the patriots'lifestyle, which we launched three years ago. and it's on ourwebsite and it is geared towards all ofthe things that you hear people talk aboutat the olympics, which is the softer side, thehumanizing of the players. but when we go andplay, we're playing
in san francisco ina few weeks, talking about what are the things, asa patriots fan, that you might want to go see there, right? or what are the clothesthat the team is wearing, the players are wearing? i mean, we were havingsome fun with what we saw in like in touch in us weekly. so what was interesting thereis that originally, we thought it was geared towards women.
but what we ultimately foundis that it wasn't geared towards women, it was gearedtoward the general fan, the person who didn't reallycare whether we were playing a nickel defense,a zone defense, or the deep, deep stuff. but just wanted tounderstand the team and the personalities behind it. so when we first launchedit, we didn't really know how patriotslifestyle was going to do.
and after the first year,which was a couple years ago, five of our top ten most viewedarticles were the lifestyle. so it was a hugelyunder served content piece, originallygeared towards women, but i think the endgame is that it isn't just women that are reading it. and it's really fun content, andwe have a great time with it. so that's example number one. the second example thati think is important
is about the actual clothinggear that we have and offer. nike came in aboutsix years ago, and there's a numberof other 47 brands. in touch, the alyssamilano clothing line is very like soft. it was not patriotspecific or team specific. and we were looking at whatwas selling in our store and who was buying it. and what is interestingas we did surveys
to try and understandwhat people were buying and what we neededmore of, we did notice that men only boughtfor men, but women bought for women and men. but a lot of the feedbackwhen we were surveying to try and understand whatwe could do to improve, and so there was a lot ofwomen that we were surveying, they were buying for men. we didn't have greatproduct for women.
so we really focused on,and it's a long process, it takes a year to buy the rightproduct and then to get it in. it's a lengthy process. so we started andthe results were very significant andprofound right away. we jumped by about 10% interms of the women's product that was selling. such to the effectthat we ultimately decided to createa women and kids
focused store atpatriot place that's separate from thepatriots pro shop. it's called the proshop collection, and geared it more towardswhat you might see at a mall or in a big shoppingarea where there is a loungy component to it. there's still obviously a hugeteam-based component to it. but in addition to havingimages of the players within the store, there's also imagesof kids wearing patriots gear
and women's. and we had another store beforewe converted into this store. and this particularpro shop collection, it more than tripled whatthat other store was doing. so we were lookingat information data and making business decisionsto reach a fan demographic that was obviously under served. and i think it's agreat credit to the kraf to have the foresightto think about data
and what it might uncover,but then actually go ahead and make that investment. and organizationally,i think the number of women who are joining ourwait list or coming to games has also increased as we'vebeen making those changes. so we're being morewelcoming to our fans and it's had a verypositive effect. so i don't know if italked for ten minutes, but that's what you've got.
- great, thank you. dan, go ahead. - so my story beginsabout ten years ago. i was a high schoolenglish teacher, a football and basketball coach in la. and that summer of2007 i quit my job, i moved back eastto new haven to live with my, now, wife who is inthe audience with us today. she was working on her phd inhistory at yale at the time,
and now we're backhere in cambridge. she's a residentdean at lowell house. we've got stronglowell connections across the panel in theroom today, very proud. so anyway, six monthsafter i moved back, espn made the obviousmove to hire me in my stunninglack of experience. needless to say, i waspsyched to take a part time job working nights at afraction of my teacher's salary.
but in all seriousness,i was excited. i was excited to workwith professional writers, and editors, and producers,passionate people, that loved what i was doing. i would be procrastinatingduring the work day, looking at espn.com. now it w like, great, iget to provide that escape and that infotainment forother workaday hacks, too. and i really lovedthe idea of trying
to fulfill espn'smission, which i got on a little card alongwith my id that first day. the mission statement says,"to serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to,discussed, debated, read about, or played." and over the ensuingseven or eight years, i worked with a lot oftalented and dedicated folks who were and are trying tofulfill that mission every day. it's an ambitious mission.
it's basically, let's beeverything to everyone, with anything thathas to do with sports. is it realistic? i don't know, but youknow i think it governed a lot of what we talked about. it's ambitious, it'sdiffuse, it's overly broad. but i think it'snoble, in some sense. how well did we dofulfilling that mission? i think really, reallywell for some things.
for the sports that dominate theairwaves on espn, major league baseball, nfl, nba, collegefootball, men's basketball, we do a great job. what i think we realize allthe time is that we struggle to do justice to servethat mission for fans of other sports,especially women's sports, especially women's team sports. and looking back at thoseeight years at espn, there's a few things thatreally just stood out
to me in terms ofwhat media's role is in this discussionof sports and gender. first, i kind ofalluded to, we take for granted that men'ssports and particularly the big three in the us,football, baseball, basketball. we should parse and examinethem from every single possible angle, constantly all the time. we take that for granted. conversely, the scope ofwomen's sports coverage
is largely limited toindividual superstars, to exceptional feats, andincredible performances. top of the top that you can'tignore from the women's sports teams. and thirdly, we get someperiodic news cycles that are predictableand get sprinkled in. we get two weeks of theolympics every four years. we get championship week in thespring for some of the quote, unquote "non-revenue"college sports.
so here and gone ina flash of an eye. third, most devastatinglymost noticeable, is that disparityin the way that we look at athletes' physicalprowess and ability. too many of us in themedia, in fans, at the bar, in the locker room,wherever it is, we fall into thissexist double standard that we've been talkingabout for a long time but topical todaymore than ever.
where we marvel and wecelebrate male athletes' bodies for their incrediblefunction and utility. wow, so fast, so strong. he's so big, he'sso tall, incredible. and on the otherhand, female bodies are still primarilyjudged on attractiveness, objectified by sex appeal. and women's bodies are thesame as men in terms of sports. they're built to do certainthings very, very, very well.
but when that falls outof a certain notion, the conversation turnsnegative in a hurry in a way that it just doesn't for men. first things first then,talking about exceptional women, exceptional individual women. especially those that combinethat talent with attractiveness are the women that gotcovered by and large more than anything else. if you look at the pageone headlines on any given
day on espn, to be fairwe're covering every sport, we're doing scores, we're tryingto do everything for everyone. but that front page that yougo, to those headline news items are dominated by the successesand the failures, the injuries, the misdeeds, the misfortunes,legal troubles of big names and top teams. it's hard for women tocrack that threshold of what's deemed page oneworthy for the widest, broadest audience.
but there are somewomen that can hang with the likes of lebron,tiger, kobe, a-rod, peyton. serena williams comes tomind as someone that has battled to get on that level. so has mariasharapova has battled to get on that level, whichincidentally are the two women that are on that highest list. they're the only two women amongthe 100 highest paid athletes in the world last year.
but they have faced criticismand dismissive attitudes that men in similar positionshave never had to deal with. serena, becauseof her skin color, because of her body type. sharapova because she wasin that anna-kournikova mold of style, allstyle, no substance. she reached number one. she's won multiple grand slams. she's forced herself to bea part of the conversation
based on her ability,endorsements and looks and sex appeal aside. so those women have made itand those women have made it onto that coverage. and some other women havebeen able to, as well. talking about the ten highestpaid female athletes, eight tennis players plusronda rousey, the mma fighter, and danicapatrick, nascar driver. obviously, again, physicalappearance, attractiveness,
is playing a role in mostof those women's ability to get endorsement contracts. and some other women do makeit onto that national stage. but again, it'speriodic, cyclical. ronda rousey, whenshe's promoting a fight. simone biles and ali raismanhere during the olympics. lindsey vonn duringthe olympics, maybe during the worldcup winter season. but again, those are kind ofpredictable and they fade.
are we going to be talkingabout simone next year? i don't know. shira knows the answer. so the second aspect, though,in terms of winning coverage at espn and on anational level is that some teams aretoo good to be ignored, regardless of what any publicattitude or what people deem as fans are interested in. and i think my very firstweeks at espn i saw this.
i started in march of 2008. so it's springtraining, march madness is the big topic forthose weeks, right? anybody remember who was themen's ncaa champion in 2008? pop quiz. kansas. kansas beat memphis overtimegame, pretty good game. bill self's firstnational title at kansas. great coverage, tons ofstories about all the top 25
teams that whole season. anybody remember who was thewomen's champion in 2008? good guess. always a good guess, but no. it was not uconn. tennessee, you got it, right? pat summitt, tennessee goesback to back those years. pat summitt's eighth nationaltitle, exceptional woman, exceptional team.
she's, at thatpoint, was already the all time winningest coach,men's or women's basketball and we did some great stories. we did really good storiesabout her and about that team. and to a lesser extent,the uconn women, the stanford women. and then it just dropped off. and really, eventennessee if you compare the volume of coverageto kansas or any of the top 25
men's teams, not close. and again, the olympics teamsfit into that idea, as well, is that they'll crop upwhen the timing is right, when it's on tv, whenadvertisers are interested. the last thing that i want tospend more time talking about is the way thatcoverage of women tends to center around bodiesand their outward womenness more than anything wetalk about with men. i had an aha moment aboutthis, also pretty early, a year
or two into my time with espn. brittany griner burstingonto the national stage. a college basketballplayer, i believe she was a freshman,starting 2009 at baylor. if anybody is a fanof basketball here or has seen brittany grinerplay, she is awesome. she's incredible. game changing, oncein a lifetime talent. she's dunking, blockingshots, rebounding, really
a revolutionary. and she gets called afreak, then and now. and randy moss in the nfl,great, great former patriot. his nickname wasthe freak, nothing but positive connotations there. he's so tall, he's so fast. he's got incrediblehands, right? freak, beast, animal,all these terms that we don't even thinktwice about ascribing
to male athletes. these terms then get usedto describe brittany griner and it's as negativea connotation as you could possibly imagine. and that really was awake up moment for me that we have got tochange this conversation. how can we celebrate all kindsof different body types for men and not do the same forwomen when they're all designed to do thesame thing, which
is excel in the most competitivelandscape that there is? so anyway, i had agreat opportunity working on the copydesk, the news desk, to see how this whole apparatusfit together, to be everything to all sports fans everywhere. we worked with writers acrossall the beats, the big three for men, all the collegesports, tennis, golf, boxing, motor sports, all of that. so on that surface,it seemed like we're
well equipped to do a good job. we have an editorial beat, wehave coverage theoretically for every segment, everyteam, every athlete. the reality, of course, is thatthe resources that are devoted to that coverage are not equal. surprise. there's no newsflash here. you all are aware of that. a lot of times,we're scrambling,
how can we get goodstories about women? we don't have writersdevoted to that. we have 32 writers coveringthe nfl, 32 plus, more than one per team. when i first started atespn, it's better now, but when i first started,we had one writer devoted to women's sports other thanwomen's basketball, covering lacrosse, soccer, hockey. and he was also a memberof the college editorial
team doing football andbasketball during the season. so you can see we had struggles. and i was not alone in thenewsroom feeling this disparity that we're leaving asegment really underserved. and so i think that environmentfostered espnw, which is a site dedicated to women. so that started in 2009,got going a little bit more in 2010. it's been plagued by controversyand criticism, debate
since those early days. to understand the climate,25% of espn viewers are women. also alluded to, about8% of programming is dedicated to women's sports. but when you're talkingabout sports center, the flagship show,it's 1.8%, 2.2%. it's never beenmore than 2% or 3% at most in the last 20 years. that gets devoted to women'ssports from a study at usc.
it's actually decreasedover the last ten years, believe it or not. and into that void comes espnw. one of the authorsof that report at usc said he had mixed feelings aboutit, quoting michael messner, quote "it's going to givewomen's sports' fans a place to go, but it might ultimatelyghettoize women's sports and kind of take espnoff the hook in terms of actually covering themon its main broadcast."
a fair criticism to be sure. i think on the flip sidethere's a lot of people, i would put myself in thatcamp, that hope and still hope that espnw ismore than a defense against these allegations ofsexism and lack of programming. i think that there is atwo-fold approach in place to devote more time andresources to covering women's sports, and especiallywomen's team sports. and also to givevoice to more women
perspectives, notjust writers, but also to give a forum to pro athletes,to fans, recreational athletes. and i think it was a chance totry and find the great stories that we know are going toresonate with an audience, kind of the similar, greatstories resonate with men and with women,regardless of or about men or women. so i'm proud that there is atleast an attempt to do that. how is it working out?
the debate continues,we can talk about that. i know there's a lot of talentedwriters there today that are reporting anddoing great stories. a lot of the criticismto me about espnw mirrors the criticismof women's sports. shira has made this pointmuch better than i ever could, that women's sportsare really defined often, all too often, aboutwhat they're not rather than what they are.
they're not as good as men,it's not as competitive, the fans are as passionate,on and on and on. all of this throwawaydismissive criticism. and here we are today. and what more starkreminder do we have than what'shappened on this campus in the last few weeks? but really, at leastin the last five years? and we know that it's beenperpetuating longer than that.
how sad is it that the presscoverage that the women's harvard soccer team isgetting in the new york times is them having todefend themselves against yet another juvenile,sexist, chauvinistic attack? we owe these women morethan that, both in the media and as fans and as people. i have athree-month-old daughter and i hope when she getson the internet we'll have a better conversation.
- i for one want to know whenthe next harvard women's soccer game is going tobe playing at home. tomorrow one o'clock. all right, all right, great. mark that on yourcalendars, everyone. it seems like it'salready been marked. - thanks jessica and dan,you've teed this up nicely. i'm a writer, so ioften think in terms of vignettes, scenesetters, stories
that are illustrativeof the bigger picture. so i'm going to take youall back to the fall of 2013 and give you alittle idea of how it works from the insidewhen you're trying to cover female athletes. so in the fall of2013, i learned that the us women'snational hockey team, which would be whittleddown to the us women's olympic hockey team was going toput its live-in training
camp in concord, lexington. it was going to bebased in massachusetts. and the interestingthing about this was that because thefemale players were on such strict stipends, theywere going, most of them, i believe it was 80%of the team members, were going to be living withlocal families in lexington, in bedford, in concord,in cambridge, wherever they could find a roombilleting with them.
and i thought, gosh, thatis a really great story. because six months from now,the attention of the world is going to be on these women. and you knew it was going tocome down to the us and canada for the gold medal in sochi. and here we had, withthe boston globe, an opportunity to go out andsee what was developing here with the team chemistry, andalso this really unique living situation.
i mean, how many of you haveolympians living next door? great story. oh, you do? ok, i see a hand going up. perfect. so you have theseolympians living next door, it's a great story. and i go to the sportseditors and i say, hey, why don't we do a reallygreat feature on these women?
i have permission from theirhost to go into the homes and really do something verycolorful, very in-depth. and the bonus is we getto know these women, humanize them, get closeto them, build contacts. so when they are inthat gold medal game or leading up to that gold medalgame in sochi, i'll have an in. i'll be able to pull themaside in the mix zone where all theinternational media is, and they'll recognize me, andit will improve our coverage
down the line. and this is nothing againstmy three male sports editors, but they passed on the story. and i said, well, this is astory that has to get done. so i went to the magazine. and the reason, by the way,that the sports editors passed was because they saw it asmore of a lifestyle story. they thought that thiswas not about athletics. and i tried to make the case.
i said, yes, but these arethe women who are going to contend for the gold medal. if it was a men's team andthere was an opportunity, let's say to-- andbelieve me, i've done this for thesports section. go and visit a bruinsplayer in his apartment and get a sense ofhim off the ice. would be noquestion, it would be go ahead, let'sassign a photographer,
let's assign a videographer. go, go, go, go, go. but that wasn't the case. so i went to the magazineand they loved it. and so we ended up doingthis story for the magazine. it was actually calledolympians next door. and the beneficiary endedup being the globe's sports section, because as predictedwhen i got to sochi, these women knew who i was andwere coming to me in the mix
zone. so i got great coverageof the women's hockey team for our local audiences. so fast forwardabout eight months. and the magazinecomes to me again. and they said, we gotreally good feedback on that women's sports story. do you have another idea? and the policy wasalways i had to pass it
through the sports editors. they had right of first refusal. i said, well, onething that's always been interestingto me is, why is it that we have a lot of femalepro sports teams in boston. we had at that time i believeit was two women's hockey teams. there was another one coming. there was a women's hockeyteam, there was a soccer team, there was a lacrosse team.
we had tons and they weregetting zero attention. they were being ignored by fans. and i said, why don'twe write an article about why do sports fansignore women's pro sports? i thought thiswas a great story. so i went to the sportseditors and i said, any interest in this? no, no, no, no, no. magazine, of course, loved it,turned it into a cover story.
now the interesting thingis, and in the process of doing that story,i got to explore a lot of the issues we're goingto be talking about today. and one of theinteresting people that i had anopportunity to talk to was mit dean, david schmittlein. he's a marketing expert. and i asked him. i said, what do women'ssports need to do?
what can they do to muster moreto generate more attention? and he says, well,i think they need to stop selling themselvesas in competition with the men's sports. you're never goingto be perceived as as good as the men's product. at least not now. so when you pit yourselfagainst the men's product, you're doomed to failure.
he says you have to market thewomen's product as something different and betterbecause of that difference. i said, well, arethere any products in the history of advertisingthat have been successful with that model where you marketthem as different and better for that difference? and he just said to me,tastes great, less filling. so light beer, he said, shouldbe a model for the way women market themselves.
tastes great, less filling,different, but better in a different way. so going back and thearticle that i did was actually a realeducation for me in terms of what women face whenthey're trying to get coverage. how difficult it canbe, how difficult it can be to marketfemale athletes and the obstacles there. and i want to go back toone of the key things,
and dan, don't takethis the wrong way, but i think one ofthe interesting things about the magazine is thatthere are three, or at the time there were threefemale editors there. and i think that people who arein decision making positions when it comes to contentmake a huge, huge difference. because they look atit differently already. you don't have tomarket to them that it's different, but better.
they see different, but better,and want to write about it, want to market it that way. so looking for placeswhere there are women in the decision making system. jess is a goodexample of that, too. i think you really can pick upon that because you're female. you can say ok, here'san underserved market. and not only is it anunderserved market, but this is anunderserved market
where we can make a big impact. and there's value there,there are customers there, there are readers there. and i think that sometimescomes from a female perspective and a female perspectivenot only as a writer, but a femaleperspective at the top. and so from there though,the interesting thing was as soon as thisarticle, this cover story, came out in themagazine, it actually
generated a heck ofa lot of comments and a heck of a lot of clicks. and the sports editors saw that. and from there, they asked me. they said, how would you feelabout writing a regular column on women's sports? and so that's what it took. you had to come around fromthe outside to prove to them. i think there's thataspect, and it's
a constant when you'redealing with women in sports and marketing and coverage. you constantly haveto prove that women are worth the coverage, thatthere's an audience out there. and it's not just one time, it'smultiple times, over and over and over again. and there's a constanteducation that goes on of male editors, ofmale readers, of female editors, of female readers aboutwhat's interesting,
what an audience willwant, and what's out there. because we talkabout great stories. dan was talkingabout great stories. there are phenomenal storiesout there about female athletes that don't get covered,and it's an endless point of frustration with me. and so i think i'llstop there, because i know we want to get onto thepanel discussion about it. but just a littlefood for thought
in terms of how it worksfrom the inside and the struggles that youface when you're pushing to get thatcoverage and get people interested in women'ssports and female athletes. - can i just say two things. first, dan, your point about theresources are not equal for men and women's sports coveragewas really interesting. and i think as i described whatwe were doing from a marketing perspective at the patriots, itwasn't all of a sudden let's go
market to women. it was a very measured approachimproving value over time. and so it's a continuinginvestment, even to the case that this pastyear in the stadium we now offer a locationfor women to breastfeed. so let's serve that and continueto help that particular fan. and then on thesecond thing, shira, you've been involvedsince the beginning. i'm also one of the co-foundersand chairs of the mit sloan
sports analytics conference. and there have been a lot ofrequests from the students for there to be panelson women's sports. - and from one moderator. - yes, and one moderator, shira. but the concern isthe actual attendees at the conferencetends to be very male heavy who are potentially notinterested in women's sports. and so one of the ways thatwe addressed that a couple
years ago is we had suebird who is probably the best point guard inwomen's basketball history. we put her on thebasketball panel. and actually we had anissue with the moderator not asking enough questions. we should have made youthe moderator, shira. but we had the issuewith the moderator not asking her enoughdirect questions. but shane battier wasalso on the panel.
he was a greatcollege player, played in the nba for a very long time. and he was the one whowas basically engaging and offering assistsif you will to sue. what was really smart iswhat sue did last year when she came back. because i remember talkingto her on the phone the year before. she's like, what am igoing to talk about?
and i said, you're an athlete. you play sports, talkabout how you use data. and she did, but i don't thinkin her mind she really realized that that's what she was doing. and then last yearwith the conference, she had actuallywritten the piece with the players'tribune that was all about how women'ssports doesn't have enough analytics around it.
and there'sobviously you kind of alluded to all ofthe data that's out there on men's sports,and that there just isn't that informationon women's sports. and i thought wow, whatan impact in a year basically now, sue hasstarted this conversation from the perch thatshe is at, it's a conversation thathad been going on. but it got a tremendous amountof notoriety and exposure
because it was theright audience, people who are in the data andanalytics covering sports. and then you have this personon a panel talking about it. [interposing voices] - jess and i talk a lot. so to piggyback off ofthe resources thing, i'm the only one who'sreally actively writing about women's sportsissues for the globe. and just to give you an idea ofsometimes how that works out,
which is marathon coverage. and i said, we really need tohave stories about women here. and we weren't having themin the pitch meetings. and as a result, i wascompletely overloaded because i'd takenon two stories. i had a slate of well, you needto get these stories done x, y, and z. and then ihad pitched a story about a nurse who hadbeen tragically killed while training forthe boston marathon.
and the breastfeedingthing reminded me of it, pregnancy exemptions. women don't getpregnancy exemptions if you become pregnant. after you register forthe boston marathon, you lose your placein the marathon or you can't reclaimit if you can't run because you'resix, or seven, or eight months pregnant.
but anyway, the point beingis with one person doing it, sometimes you justcan't get to it all. and you look aroundand you say, i want to be writingabout this, but i have to write about the kenyanchampion, or this champion. and it's unfortunate becausewomen in the business do want to write andcover female athletes, but they don't have the time. and they're not given,sometimes, the support
from the people who are there. - i guess i would say thatyou kind of alluded to, but even when i took over thepatriots' retail business, we had ten people in thebusiness, there were no women. so there was noone who even would say what is the women's productthat we should be buying. and i'm not going tosit here and say i'm the most fashionable person. and i don't necessarily know.
but the stuff thati like might not be what-- there's manydifferent types of women. there's women who want towear big baggy stuff and then women who want to wearmore fashionable stuff. and so understanding enoughpeople were saying to me you need betterwomen stuff, i don't know if they would havesaid that to the men, but they said it to me. i was in a position toactually action off of it.
and we now actually,when a product comes in, we pull i feel like i can speakfor one set or view of what women might like. but then we have the morefashionable women come in and say, would you wear this? would this work? and we have them actuallygo through the catalog and help us pickout those products. - and i remembertalking, also, i actually
had lunch with sue birdafter the conference right after she spoke. the other thing thathappens is that there are such subtle ways ofdiscriminating against women in sports that sometimesyou don't even recognize it until it's too late. it's just there is for lack ofa better way of describing it, it is still in many waysa male dominated culture. and some people, some mendon't see it the same way.
and it's a lot of educationand it takes time. - it does. and that extends to-- - says the man. - well, the athletes,it's true in sports on both sides of the camera. you know how itis in the newsroom and trying to pitch stories tooften all-male sports editors. made me think of somethingthat happened just this summer.
i don't know if it wasunder the radar or not, but espn has a sports reportersshow, which i always loved. it's the people that knowsports the best having a conversation not unlike this. the first time that all threepanelists or four panelists were women happened twomonths ago in late august 2016 was the first timethat it was all women. how many times was it all men? too many to count.
how many times wasjackie macmullan the only woman on the show? - jamelle hill, yeah. - now i think it was jamellehill, kate fagan, who does great storiesfor espnw and more. who are the other two? - but also, look at thattiming of that though. late august, the olympicshad just finished. - it's what we would considerthe dead time in sports.
but that being said,women just have to seize those opportunities. you have to, even if espn iscalling you for the 5 am call in, you take it because youhope that that can lead. you have to build up yourrepertoire in a way, i think, that men don't haveto to gain entry, to gain credibility withinthe reporting world, and within the athlete world. even if you're a sue bird,you need to prove yourself.
just sad. - so we've been talking a lotabout the demand for coverage of women's sports. and i'm wondering a littlebit about the push side from the athletes. what struggles do femaleathletes and their coaches have in getting coverage? do they havedifferent strategies than male athletes do?
what do you see fromthat side of things? - wow. i think femaleathletes feel they have to be incrediblyaccessible, incredibly available, all of the time. i think male athletes cansay ok, this is my day to talk after practice. i mean, i can't tellyou how many times i would go to celtics practiceand paul pierce or kevin
garnett or ray allen wouldsay, not talking today. you would never, ever, nomatter how big the star is, see that happen witha female athlete. i went out tostorrs, connecticut, before the olympics when theus women's basketball team was having a training camp there. and these are the biggest namesin basketball in the country. and it was packedwith reporters. and i kid you not, i think mediaaccess lasted two hours, maybe.
two, two and a half hours. there were people stilldoing stand ups when i left at around the two hour mark. every player was available,whatever you needed. if you needed a 20 minuteinterview, with x, y or z player, you got it. if you needed three 20 minute. i mean, there was no limits. and by the way,this was the first
of three days ofthis training camp where they would doexactly the same thing. so i think from anathlete standpoint, one of the thingsthat happens is there's a feeling that you haveto be constantly available. i think there'salso the feeling, and i know female reportersfeel it, you can't say no. even if it's not the best,most ideal situation for you, you can't say no because younever know where it will lead.
and i think about this when ithink of some of the athletes i know who i wouldnot have thought were candidates forespn's the body issue, but posed for thebody issue anyway. because i think they feltthat this was, perhaps, going to put them in contactwith some espn magazine editors, help them andtheir agent make connections with people in the mediathat could be valuable i don't think theynecessarily wanted
to pose for the body issue,but they did it as a way in the door, whichis unfortunate. - did that work for them? - it did work for one of them. she got more twitter followers. she got more attention. but she also issomebody who had been-- the other thing is social mediais a big part of this, too. female sports andathletes, teams, athletes
rely incredibly on socialmedia, because they don't have the tv deals. and if they dohave the tv deals, it's not a whole slate of games. it's here and there. so you have the sports media. again, it goes back to theall accessible aspect of this. so yes, it workedfor this one athlete, but this was at the end oftwo or three years of her just
being constantly on socialmedia, doing different videos, trying to put herself out there. because she needed money. because she neededendorsement deals. she was trying to,as a hockey player, she was trying to makea living without having to take a second job that wouldhave cut into her training time. because she was caughtin this catch 22
that so many femaleathletes are caught in, which is you either takea second job as a coach, a private coach, assistantcollege coach to help make ends meet. but that cuts intoyour training time incredibly so you can't bethe player you want to be. or you try tofigure out some way to promote yourself, get someendorsement deals so you can devote yourself fulltime to your sport,
so you can be theplayer you want to be. it's this constant catch 22that female athletes face. - one thing that i thoughtwas really interesting that dan said was about howeight of the top ten highest paid women are tennis players. and i think that's a hugecredit to billie jean king and the stance that shetook many years ago to have equal pay to the men's program. and then i think theus women's soccer team
in the 90s with mia hamm,they took a similar stand that everyone shouldbe paid the same. and i think whathappened this past year, and you guys couldspeak to it better than i can, after thewomen won the world cup and trying to takeadvantage of that to make sure that they weregetting paid equally to men. and the responseto it was actually pretty surprising tome in a negative way.
but i think that-- shira and i were talkinga little bit about this before the panel how now wewere the same year and friends in college. but how now looking back,we see we thought when we were in college it was equal. we had all the sameequality as athletes. and we didn't, right? and even as we've beengoing through our careers,
we thought it wasthe same equality. but it's not. and i think that the youngwomen today in their 20s think that it'sequal, but it's not. and i think forthe female athletes today to take those stands likebillie jean king or the women's soccer team in the 90sor again this past year, it feels like there needs tobe a broader awareness by all the female athletesof the power of them
as a group versus a one, whetherthey're in an individual sport or in a team sport. i don't know if that ultimatelyleads to more tv coverage, but i think it certainlyaddresses what you just brought up about thetraining and the things that were needed in order to continueto compete at that elite level. - great points. yeah, the billie jean kingin the 70s and title ix really resonates, too.
and how that fight,there wasn't a lot of progress from 1920to 1970 probably. i think 1970, you wouldknow better than me-- - 1975, which was the year iwas born was when title ix-- - and not too much beforethat, women's basketball was not a full courtgame, which is just crazy to think about now. - just think about this. 1980 until 1984 you didn't havewomen running distance races
in the olympics. it was a fight for that becausethey thought their ovaries were going to fall out. not even that, in 2014 insochi was the first time they had women's ski jumping. and it was just amazing tohear about these women who had been ski jumpingfor 10, sometimes 12 years, saying it'sabout gosh darn time that we're invited to the party.
and there were still somemale european coaches who were saying this isn'tphysically safe for a woman to do. and citing someof the old 1940s, 50s literature aboutwomen's ovaries falling out when theywere ski jumping. you would read thesecomments come across on the quote sheets insochi and you'd be like, what decade are we living in?
- but i think it's aninteresting point, because i can speak for myself,just having grown up playing team sports, played ongreat teams here at harvard, and seeing what all of myclassmates and teammates and the alumni before me. some of them arehere in the room. some folks after me whoare also here in the room. like what people nowbelieve that they can do and are afforded to do.
and they've beenin this environment where they understand team,which is actually really, really important ina business setting. sure, even theapproach that you've taken to looping inthe sports editors to make sure that you havebuy in from them before you go to the magazine. that's really fascinating andpolitically astute, obviously. but it's something that as anathlete you learn those things
and you pick up those things. i'm not saying youwouldn't learn it if you were devotingyourself to anything else very seriously and passionately,but i think just as an athlete, you start to learnto think like that. and i think collectively,we're starting to see people who wereimpacted by title ix getting to more senior levels in sportsbusiness or sports journalism or sports media orwhatever it might be.
and the hope is that someof these things that we're talking about, even like katieledecky, the longest race that she was able toswim wasn't as long as the longest men'srace, when are there going to be women inthose positions who can enact thatchange and understand that there is no real reasonwhy that race isn't happening? - that brings up a questioni had for you guys, which is really about therole of the olympics
in changing public perceptionabout women's athletics. we've talked a little bitabout the spike in interest and then the fade off. how do you see it in alonger term perspective? - how do you see a longer term? i'll take this first,only because i'm somewhat recently returned from rio. it's tough, because ithink even at the olympics you have a disparity therein terms of the coverage
that men and women get. and what's alwaysinteresting to me is it's like the men will havebeen followed much longer. you'll have moreof a story to them, you'll know more about themgoing into the competition. and then the womenare not portrayed as overnight successes,but they come across as overnight successesbecause there's not that background,that same lead-up
with the female athletes. even though i will be in myeditor's office eight months earlier talking about weshould have this athlete, we should have that athlete. they looked at me cross-eyedwhen i said to them. listen, this is notjust at the globe or with male sports editors. sometimes it'sjust our awareness of female athletes in general.
but they looked atme cross-eyed when i said you knowwhat, we have got to do a feature on thisrower named gevvie stone. i said, trust me, we need to go. she's training incambridge, it will be great. we should bring a video. and again, with theaccess part of it, i said i know willhave unfettered access. so we got to get downthere and do this story.
and they're like ok,ok, but i don't know if they were so enthusiastic. and they ran it in one ofthe dead weeks leading up to the olympics so i don't knowif people even saw the story. and it turns out shewins a silver medal, and it's the first silvermedal in that event i think in somethinglike 12 years. and not only that. the kicker was i talkedto her after the race.
and she was an outsidemedal contender, but not a true favorite. i said, to what doyou credit your win? and she says, the charles river. and i thought oh, thisis a dream come true. this is the perfect boston storycoming out of the rio olympics. but you had to press to getthat coverage in advance. i mean, they're great. it just kills me,because i feel like there
are so many better women'sstories because there are so many moreundiscovered stories out there because womendon't get that lead up that the men do oftentimes. or they're not knownquantities before the olympics. so i feel like there were toomany stories for me to even do. - well, and i guessi'll just say i think that's where we cantie things back to data. and that's the great equalizer.
i just thought i would. - you can start to seewhat people are reading, and you see the impact. and even as i'm trying to helpjustify business decisions, i'm using data. and this was stuff thatreally wasn't there 10 or 15 years ago. but even print, you couldn'tsee the impact of an article. now you can see whatpeople are reading.
you can see the comments thatpeople are making on them. - yeah, so i would saythough the one caveat to that and something that frustratesme is data can also be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecywhen you're in journalism. for example, we know whenpeople will get on a website and click on a story. we know the high traffic times. well, if you're loading upa story on a female athlete outside of thosehigh traffic times,
those numbers aregoing to be lower. so then it becomes thisself-fulfilling prophecy where you're not getting the clicks. so what can i do about that? - i'll go to espn real quick,because there's a wnba game 5 and i wish i watchedmore women's basketball. but i was like oh,this is a great game. and i go to espn thinkingit's going to be on espn. it was on espn2 and i waslike, are you kidding me?
and it was an amazing game. i mean, it was an amazing game. so i don't have an answerfor-- they didn't put it on the - it's frustrating. it's frustrating when you see astory loaded up on any website and again, this is nationally. when you see and i scan papersacross the country and see what they're writing about. when you see, at 9 o'clockon a saturday night,
you see a great featureabout some female boxer or some female wrestler loadedup onto the los angeles times website. and you're like, huh? - i think i've figured it out. you need to become the sportseditor of the boston globe. - thank you. - i see becky is puttingout the microphone. i'm sure you guys havelots of questions.
- my pr agent. - yeah. come on up to the mic andif you'll say your name and give us your question,that would be awesome. - again, i just want to saysomething about the globe. the important thing, though,is places like the globe and places likeespnw are trying. at least they are puttinga women's sports column out there.
they are puttingespnw out there. whether it'sghettoizing it or not, they're getting peopleto write that content and playing with it. it's a start, it's a start. - it's a two part battle. we have to do thestories and then we can fight for front pageplacement for the popular 9:00 am to noon mondaytraffic window.
- so the globe andespnw are a little bit, they're not ahead of thecurve, but at least they're putting stuff outthere, trying to start something of a conversation. there are a lot of kinksto be ironed out, though. - and it's not a 24hour news cycle anymore. i mean, there's fournews cycles a day, right? - 4? about 12.
- yeah, 12, right? even more. the big traffic stories arehere and gone in a heartbeat. these aren't journalisticworks of lasting worth. these are splashy headlineswith big names and scandal. - and sometimes that worksagainst coverage, as well. - it's an echo chamber,too, and you're like, oh my god, we'vegot so many clicks. we've got to keep doing this.
well, yeah, ok. you got a click, but did youreally make a lasting impact? is this resonatingwith an audience? no, it has broad appeal. it's like drivingpast a train wreck. and so not to denigrateall the stories that we do, but the beststories are the ones that are going to be read today. they're going to be readsaturday night at 9 o'clock.
you can discoverit two months later because somebodyshared it on facebook. those are the kinds ofstories that shira's doing, that were the mostimportant ones that we did at espn boston. we need more clicks alwaysto be able to devote more resources to finding them. and really i am convinced,maybe naive and too optimistic, i'm convinced thatquality storytelling
is going to win out. because we do have social media. because peoplecan go more direct and because there are otherways to get audience and get buy in from consumers that isoutside any editorial decision making placement process. that's my hope. i hope it works out that way. we've got to fight thebattle every day pretty much.
- so i am paula lawsonbarksdale in class of '87. and i want to say thatfirst of all, this has been fantastic already. i am not an athlete, buti'm a big sports fan. i'm the one who lives near kerriwalsh and loves the patriots and was hooting back there. so i just want to sayhow grateful i am, but also just for perspective,even though clearly we have so far to go, assomebody who is pre-title ix,
there's so much good stuff. i love that my dadwatching the olympics is following the women'sstories as much as the men's and that sort of thing. and there's a lotof great stuff. i work with high schoolstudents preparing them to go to college. and i work with a lotof recruited athletes. and my girls have at least asmany opportunities as the boys,
and that is phenomenalto me, it's great. so i remain optimistic, eventhough i know we're only this far along on the path. but my question,actually, and i hope it's not too i don't know what. but i was thinking aboutthis notion of sex appeal and how that inmany ways it does actually work for men, aswell, not to the same degree. i remember people commenting onlarry bird being unattractive
and me thinking, that's notreally his frickin' job. are you watching him play? and i was actuallywondering, jessica, what you all are seeing. and not justanecdotally, but are you looking at anyanalytics saying, what does it do for our teamthat tom brady is gorgeous, is married to asupermodel, and he has that every guywants to be him,
everyone wants to be with him. and what does thatdo to the number of women who are wearingnumber 12 jerseys in terms of merchandising andviewership and ticket sales? is that somethingthat you track at all? - we're not specificallytracking his sex appeal, which i think is the question. no, he's arguably the bestquarterback in nfl history. and his jersey salesare really impressive,
both by the men andwomen and youth. no, we're notlooking at-- i mean, it's an interesting question. but i think that heis a very good person. i think people inthe media may not think he's such a good person. - i have a free tom bradyshirt, so i'm all in. - we're on the same page. but i think, actually, thegiselle thing has as much
of a factor as anythingbecause she is so much bigger of a presence globally. we were going to make an entryinto china in 2007, 2008. i was over there threetimes in six months. no one had any idea whotom brady was, right? because they don'treally play football. the nfl has been makinga big push there, but we said giselle's-- i'm notsure if they were married then, but husband or boyfriend.
oh, yeah, we know giselle. so i think here wherefootball is obviously so huge in the unitedstates, it's very critical. but no, we're notmeasuring his sex appeal. we are very much takingadvantage of his actual skills. one other thing i did want tosay real quick that i think is interesting as we'regoing through generational. so i have two boys, they'rethree and five months. but i bring them to a lot ofharvard women's basketball
games. last march, duringmarch madness, we turned on themen's final four. and he looks up and he saysoh, harvard basketball, harvard women's basketball. and i go, not exactly. but in his mind,watching women's sports, and again, the influenceof me is normal. and he likes watching,i guess he does.
but he likeswatching or he thinks basketball is women playing. so i think thatthere will continue-- you said we're on the road. i think it's going to justcontinue with each generation. - oh, totally. again, just beingpre-title ix what i've experiencedversus of course, my kids have grownup only thinking
of women as being as athletic asmen and equal in so many ways. they're not ever goingto reach the level where they're going to realizethat it's not post-collegiate. but yeah, i'mtotally optimistic. thank you. and i hope i didn't sound toosilly with the sex appeal, but i really was thinking. - as a former marketer myself,and as a displaced patriots fan, i see how many womenare watching that game
all over the country. and i yeah, they stunkwhen i was growing up and now they're really good. but i really dowonder how much people are watching tom terrific. just a thought, thanks. - well, he hasn'tconfirmed that. i actually had to hidemy free tom brady shirt. i almost burned itwhen he said that.
but i'm justseparating that out. - just a quick comment. i'm lynn osborn. i'm a rower. i graduated fromprinceton in 1979. you are not pre-title ix. title ix was passedin 1972, i believe. and it was 1977 whenthe ladies at yale made us realize at princetonthat we didn't have a locker
room. but it didn't occur tous until they did that. i have a question, though. it seems that the symphonyorchestra business realized after decadesthat women just weren't able to play. that, of course, womencan't play like men. when they created a curtainthat the players played behind when they did theirauditions and now
the symphonies are 50/50. i'm just wondering that yourdata may be the way for us to move in that direction. - yeah, i meanobviously i've been a big believer in analytics. understanding athletes,understanding fans, customers, marketers. i do think it'sgoing to continue to help us understand whereour unconscious biases are.
and i think being aware ofthose unconscious biases in that example from this isawesome and a great situation. i do think there actually arephysical differences, though, between male andfemale athletes. but there are cases where theycan be as technology continues to advance and improve,i'll be interested to see how it impacts and changes. - i would love to seean experiment where you put together likea series of pitches,
and they're genderneutral pitches. you don't identify whether it'sa male or a female athlete, and you just pitchit to the editor and you see which onesthey come away with. - that is really cool. - and i think it wouldprobably be 50/50. that's what i'm guessing. irrespective ofgender, i think you go for the better storyand maybe even 60/40.
i think women's storiestend to be more interesting. - hi, i'm jen ballin. i'm a second yearmba at mit sloan, also working on the sportsanalytics conference, and very interested in thistopic as a female athlete. also interested inthe data discussion. so my question iffor you, shira. you talked aboutdifferent, but better. so have you been able toanalyze through metrics
on the sports columnwhat are these different, but better topics? and to that extent,who's cooking? - oh gosh, no. we have not done it. we should probably dosome serious analytics on the various-- maybe that'sa good-- are you interested? we have not. and part of the issue isit's only two years old
and would like to do moreof them more regularly. there's probably agrouping now of about 30, 35 to look at, if that. but i think it wouldbe interesting to see. i do know that the threemost popular columns have been one where italked about, i don't know if you're familiarwith the woman sara atar. she's a runner who competed. she's essentially a us citizen,but she shares citizenship
with saudi arabia. so she competed for saudi arabiain the 2012 and 2016 olympics. and that got a huge response. the other one was acase of discrimination against a femalehockey coach who didn't have her contractrenewed after being the most successful collegehockey coach in division i women's hockey. she also happened to be themost highest paid women's coach
in college hockey. and then the third onethat was the most popular was, i don't knowif you recall, but i don't think his daughter'sstill here, sara. but dan shaughnessy wroteabout how it was not worth watching the uconn women'sbasketball team play because you knew theywere going to win and it was going to belike a 50 point blowout. and why, basically, hedidn't quite say this,
but it wasn't competition. and they defeated the purposeof having an ncaa tournament if you knew theywere going to win. and so very popularcolumn in response to him. and i actually called him duringthe national championship game and said, are youwatching, and just wrote about talkingwith him during the national championship game. and basically, with the pointi don't want to say attack dan,
but said, that'san invalid point. and we have toget past the point where women aren'tgrateful for whatever they receive in terms of coverage. and a lot of womenresponded to that notion of not being grateful,but believing you deserve whatever attention you get. so i got a ton of letters. - that was a great column.
didn't you talk aboutthe women's national team in that column? - yes, i did talk aboutthe women's national team in that column. see? somebody read it. and thank you everyonefor being here. - hello, linda robinson class of'72 and lifelong red sox season ticket holder.
i have a question. and i'm obviously100% with you guys. but this is aprovocative question. - love it. - there's a whole questionbetween sports as competitions, sports is personal fulfillment,which is really a team building growth thing we talk aboutsports for schoolchildren and to some extent in college,and sports as entertainment. i personally, perhaps i'm wrong,believe that it's not just
billie jean king's effortsand the continuing efforts of other tennis players. but the fact thatthere is no question that the women's tennisgame brings in the dollars and brings in the attendance. and it's often in years whenthe men's game has been lopsided that people came tosee the women more than they came to see the men. so it was very easy,in that context,
to say women deservethe same money, because they're bringing in-- - or more. - or more, perhaps even. but - same with women's soccer, too. i think it's the moreentertaining game in the us. the women's team isfar more entertaining than the men's team.
- certainly in the us. i agree with you there. but what do you say, and maybedan could speak to this some because i'm sure he hearsthis from his work at espn, we're in theentertainment business and people aren'tpaying to see these-- how do you see your role toincrease the entertainment value, if i will say? - that's a great question.
it's a struggle. espn, we are trying to maintainthat journalistic integrity of editorial operates in a silo. and business publishingis in another silo. the reality isthat's impossible. it's a false dichotomybecause the leagues that we cover we'repaying billions of dollars a year to have therights to their product, to put them on their airwaves,to sell advertisements to make
up for those huge rights fees. maybe i'm not speakingtowards entertainment. at the end of the day,it is entertainment. it's infotainment, alot of what espn does. i do think that there are a lotof great journalists that come from an old school printtradition that are both in the .com and theprint and digital house, as well as on the tv side. so i do think journalisticintegrity has risen.
but it's unavoidable. there's no solution,it's impossible. when you're in bedtogether, i mean there's any number ofstories that we can point to over the last ten yearswhere news coverage has been slow to develop because of acertain player's indiscretion and what they mean to the brand. i can think aboutone in particular with ben rothlisberger.
- rapes in georgia, right? - and also in tahoe inthe golf tournament, there was some slow reportingthere for an outfit. we're all in acompetitive business, everybody wants to befirst to break news. the reality is most of usare all at the same access and we're writing the samestories for men's teams. and so when it comesto these situations where some of the biggest,most valuable properties
and entities are inpossibly compromising, less than favorable outrightillegal circumstances, there have been times whenthe coverage has been slow. now i can take somesolace in the fact that you can't avoid it forever. and there are peoplein the room that are saying, why are we waiting? why are we waiting? this is newsworthyright now today.
and every secondthat we wait, we're losing credibilitywith our fans. and we're losing thatmission to maintain journalistic integrity. so there's always that tension. ideally, you're aware of it,but editorially, those decisions aren't getting delayedon the editorial side. it's not happening on that side. it's different than, idon't know a quote unquote,
"independent newspaper". espn is a funnysituation that it's one of the biggest rightsholders to all these entities. but it is still ajournalistic outfit. it's different than the nflnetwork covering the nfl. it's different thanthe mlb network. so i would say that thoseentities that are really keeping their ownproduct and controlling coverage and accessin-house, they're
all about entertainment. and you're not going to seea lot of the negative stuff at all there. and that, to me,that's their role. i can't argue withtheir business model. that's why it's importantthat the journalists that have a stake in thiscontinue to do their jobs and aren't handcuffed. i'm not sure i touched onentertainment at all there.
i'm sorry. - yeah, i startedout by saying that we created different contentfor women, that people consume different. and we created differentcontent for women, but found that itwasn't just women who wanted that content, right? it was the general fan. i will say i wouldgo to espn pre-espnw
to read the women'sbasketball coverage. and it was great. it was how i like to readabout women's basketball. espnw then it gotflipped and they stopped covering women'sbasketball that way. and it was no longeron the main site and they were coveringit differently. i think in the last year or twoit's changed, which is good, because as a consumerof sports, i didn't
like how it was being covered. and it had been, as youkind of said, something that wasn't being covered by espn. so i think thatwe're in a generation of highly targeteddifferent ways of personalizing information. and i think the waythat things seem to be consumed from anentertainment perspective is it isn't one size fits all.
and i think that's whatwe're talking about, that there might needto be multiple ways. there are multiple ways thatmen's sports are consumed. and we're maybe not thereyet with women's sports for a whole host ofdifferent reasons. and i would say i mightbe an oddity in terms of how i wanted to consumewomen's sports the way that traditionallyespn had covered it. and i wasn't really interestedin how they were covering it
for four or five years. but i think that'ssomething that you guys will have to speak to and evolveand change over time. we have seen great successat the kraft sports group with what we have beendoing to try and cater, we thought was awomen's audience, but it actually turns out itwas much bigger than that. - jessica, i think younailed-- sorry, go ahead. - because thereare plenty of women
who know the difference betweenthe theme and a skinny post. - exactly. i'm not one of them. - i've got my eyeon the shot clock and i think itlooks like we have time for one more question. - hi, i'm danielle. i'm actually a junior atlasalle college over in newton. i'm studying journalismand public relations.
and as a student,i obviously have watched the olympicsover the summer while i had plenty of time. and i watched everythingto do with gymnastics because it's so good. and i notice how mediacoverage with them was always about howthey were as athletes. like simone biles, they talkedabout her being an athlete, not sex appeal or anythinglike that, which i thought
was really good. but i had no idea who any of theathletes on the male gymnastics team were. so i wanted to knowwhat your thoughts are on the flopped, theflip flopped, way of media coveragefor some sports as opposed to other sports. with also women's volleyball. i never really see anythingabout men's volleyball
on the olympics. - well, it'sinteresting that you talk about how they were alwaystalked about as athletes. but i think underneath, evenif it wasn't stated, part of it was the appeal of seeing theseincredibly athletic women in leotards. and i know there wasactually a male gymnast who said during the olympics whenasked, what can the men's gymnasts do, here, to get moreattention, to take attention?
he goes, we can competewith our shirts off. and he actually didtake his shirt off for the exhibition portion. they held an exhibition. so i think as much as itseems like on the surface there was coveragethat was devoted to these youngwomen as athletes, underneath thatwas a layer of look at these women in leotards.
i think the same thing existswith volleyball, particularly with beach volleyball. because i was over atcopacabana and watching some of the men's contests andsome of the women's contests. and now listen, rio's abeach volleyball loving city. but the crowds werejust more into it. it was a more electricatmosphere, at least for the matches that i went to,when the women were playing. and i'm guessing part of thatis because of the bikini.
so they may talk aboutthem as athletes, but i think underlying some ofthe popularity of those sports is the sex appeal, whetherthey state it on nbc or not. it's definitely,definitely there. - well, thank you. this is a great conversation. and i want tothank the panelists and you, as an audience. i think it really wasa two way conversation.
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