International Women’s Day: BBC director of sport Barbara Slater on the growth of women’s sport and the shifting attitudes to females both on and off screen during 12 years at the helm of BBC Sport
Not many people expected the BBC to appoint a woman as director of sport back in 2009. Men dominated senior sports roles across the industry. It’s just how it was. The BBC decided it was time to shatter that glass ceiling and I feel privileged to have been trusted with the role. I have been told on more than one occasion that my length of tenure has confounded general expectations at the time – I think that’s intended as a compliment. Thankfully, those engrained attitudes appear to be dying out.
“Not many people expected the BBC to appoint a woman as Director of Sport back in 2009.”
When I look around BBC Sport today I see a workforce with a much improved gender balance than when I started. My senior leadership team is not far off 50-50. On screen we see an array of brilliant women presenters, reporters and pundits. The pipeline of new talent is becoming more diverse. There’s still a way to go but the direction of travel is clear and irreversible.
“When I look around BBC Sport today I see a workforce with a much improved gender balance”
For most of my career, I’ve been reading about the demise of sport on the BBC. Yet, here we are and the BBC is still the most popular sports service in the UK. True, the competitive landscape has transformed in the last 25 years – we’ve lost rights and won new ones, that’s the nature of the beast. But we still account for up to 40% of all the viewing of sport on UK TV, and we’ve built an online offer that pulls in more than 20 million unique browsers each week. And over the last decade we’ve leveraged these assets for the benefit of women’s sport.
A great example is the BBC’s unrivaled commitment to women’s football. A few months before I started in my post, the Women’s European Football Championships pulled in just 2.5 million UK TV viewers – with Germany comfortably beating the Lionesses in the final in Finland.
Fast forward to 2019, and the Women’s World Cup in France attracted more than 10 times as many viewers – 27 million. It was the most watched sporting event of the year and that was a year in which England’s men reached a Rugby Union World Cup Final. Who would have predicted that at the start of 2019, let alone 2009?
This landmark achievement didn’t come about by chance: sports bodies; players; sponsors all played their part. The reader may point to bias, but under any objective assessment, the BBC’s role in the growth of women’s football in the UK has been pivotal.
“We’ve ramped up our free-to-air coverage [of women’s football] on TV, radio and digital platforms significantly.”
We’ve ramped up our free-to-air coverage on TV, radio and digital platforms significantly – not just the domestic and international matches but the day-to-day reportage and story-telling. We’ve taken the sport to the widest possible audience.
Success can be measured in many different ways – perversely perhaps, the increased level of competition the BBC now faces when trying to secure the rights to women’s football is one of them. It’s why we were delighted to secure the rights to the women’s European Football Championships in 2021 (now in 2022).
Today is International Women’s Day and the theme this year is ‘choose to challenge’. We’re running a week’s worth of stories across broadcast platforms to do just that. The centrepiece is a major survey of prize money in men’s and women’s sport, an update from our last health-check in 2017. There’s positive news to report which is another sign of the change happening across the sporting world.
Where will women’s sport be 10 years from now? Recent history suggests it’ll be in a far better place than we would predict right now. Real progress relies on expectations being confounded.