Julie Dicaro - Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America

In this introduction, Im supposed to tell you why I wrote this book. So lets see. I wrote it, I think, because of all the things I felt I couldnt say working in sports media, and all the times other women have whispered things to meimportant thingsand sworn me to secrecy... and then checked in on me multiple times to make sure I kept my promise and didnt tell anyone.

I wrote it because there are only 240 characters in a tweet, and every time a troll rolls up on me, I have to weigh my mental health against the burning desire to tell him off, and because there are never enough characters in the world to say all the things I want to say. No one should have as many bad days as women who work in media do.

I wrote it because working in sports talk radio, in many ways, is like working in a frat house. But you cant say that, not publicly, unless you want everyone at work to be furious with you.

I wrote it for all the women in sports and sports media, as well as for all the women who work in male-dominated industries, who go to work every day and have to bite their tongues and swallow their cutting retorts to the men around them. Because, knowing what I know, they have every right to let those retorts fly.

I wrote it for the woman on Twitter who told me that I seem to see everything through the lens of sexual discrimination, because yes, that will happen when you work in an industry with almost no women that is, actually, rife with sexual discrimination. Sometimes youre a hammer and everything actually is a nail.

Mostly, though, I wrote it because I realized, somewhere around year two of my six years working in sports media, that whatever issues women have in society in general, theyre amplified by a factor of about a million in sports. Women who work in the industry swim in a toxic stew of gender inequality. Often it seems as if no one cares.

As such, this is a book about sports thats not really about sports. Its about women. Sports is merely the lens through which well look at problems that permeate being a woman in the United States and likely everywhere else in the world.

Well talk about Serena Williams crying at work, but weve all cried at work before, right? Well talk about the history of sexual harassment at ESPN, but well do so knowing that the Worldwide Leader in Sports is far from the only corporation where gender harassment is said to be endemic. Well talk about how men (and other women) contribute to a culture of white male supremacy, knowing that its an issue in every industry in America and likely beyond.

Sports talk radio is a bizarre industry. It sounds like the best job in the world (and Ill give you this: it beats spending the morning trying to control your client in divorce court), but its populated by some of the meanest and most miserable people (men) Ive ever met. People who love radio really love radio, and I really did. But theres something about the off hours, the deluge of people calling or texting in to yell at you all the time, the backbiting competitiveness of it, that makes people hard and cynical and sometimes nasty.

Its also an industry where you can listen all day and never hear a womans voice, maybe not even in commercials. When I fell ass-backward into my first radio job after practicing law for more than ten years, I couldnt believe it had actually happened. Id been raised on Chicagos WGN Radio during its golden years, listening to Uncle Bobby Collins on the way to school with my dad and catching the end of Spike ODell on my way home from soccer or gymnastics practice. I went into radio feeling like the luckiest woman on the planet, but I left feeling disillusioned and sad. And yet, I miss my microphone and my weeknight show terribly. I didnt want to leave the industry; I just wanted to industry to grow the fuck up.

Even though many radio stations have beat reporters on staff, it exists in a weird place where sales rule. As such, theres not much editorial freedom. The station can shut down a story just because they dont want to upset an important team or client. In a tough media climate with mass layoffs lurking around seemingly every corner, I found myself always looking over my shoulder and obsessing about making a mistake. Focused like a laser on not saying the wrong thing. And yet I always seemed to find the wrong thing to say. Those wrong things were nearly always social justice issues, talking about Colin Kaepernick or violence against women or racial injustice. Yet those were the things that made sports interesting to me: the interplay between political tensions in our society. But those same issues brought down a world of hurt on me, both online and in my career. There are so many obstacles for women in sports radio to navigate, but, by and large, we navigate them alone.

Radio is a sink-or-swim business, meaning theres no real formal training. Sure, you might do a bunch of score updates or work in the producers booth, but theres really not much to prepare you for the first time you host a show, especially if you dont have a cohost. While Im sure its also a daunting task for men, theres a whole extra level of toxicity for women to learn to handle.