For a long while, gender studies have examined sport’s presence in society and the sexism explicit in it being a domain that is traditionally male-oriented, both in terms of players and fans, harbouring gender disparity on a global scale. We can only assume that last week when Sky announced the launching of their new social media channel ‘Sky Sports Halo’ targeted at female sports fans and championing female athletes, they truly did mean well. It would seem that they wanted to create a safe, informative and celebratory space for women involved in sports. The deleting of all content from the newly launched TikTok page after only three days, however, is indicative of the colossal failure that said platform actually was.
The TikTok page was supposedly designed to provide content for women, perhaps noting some of the biggest sporting triumphs seen by female athletes or delving into the empowerment that is found through being a woman on the field. Instead, it gave us sporting clips with filters that put a pink tint and sparkles on everything, attaching reductive captions – ‘How the matcha + hot girl walk combo hits’ – as if female sport is nothing more than meme-able brain rot. The channel demeaned us, reducing female appreciation and involvement in sport to a joke. Critics remarked the page looked as if it were designed for kids, infantilizing women with its condescending content and in referring to the platform as the ‘lil sis’ of sky sports, there is a patronising suggestion that female sports are to be taken less seriously overall.
Considering the layers of checks that such a creation must have gone through, it is shocking that nobody who was part of the team creating this content picked up on the very pertinent potential that it would cause offense. It goes without saying that everyone was enraged with the rampant sexism implicit in Sky Sports Halo’s content. It should be considered, however, that the issue with the channel lies not only in its content but in its very existence. Sky may have meant well, but is creating a separate sporting channel for women really the best approach in helping female athletes be seen and letting fans feel heard? Sidelining women to their own separate platform only serves to ‘other’ women’s sport more than our culture has already done for decades.
The term ‘othering’ originates from the works of feminist Simone De Beauvoir in her book ‘The Second Sex’, in which she argues that men exist and are regarded within society as the default, primary exemplar of humankind, meaning that women are the deviant gender – they are the ‘other’. Sport is one of the domains where this ‘othering’ is palpable, as men’s sport has always received more respect, appreciation and money than women’s. The public are therefore divided on whether creating an entirely new channel just for women is actually an empowering recognition of women in sport, or whether it is actually a means to kick them off the centre stage more than they already have been, keeping them off of Sky Sports main channel so that men can continue to dominate the field. Surely, the more inclusive approach would be to demand more visibility for women within the sporting domains that already exist. Rather than making whole new ‘lil sis’ platforms, Sky could make their primary sports channel more diverse and celebrate women without needing additional channels. Sky Sports Halo is therefore not the revolutionary solution it presents itself as. It is only through closing the gaps in disparities that are currently present within the sporting world that we might see change in how women’s sport is perceived and hopefully one day bear witness to a level playing field.