Sexist Tokenism

After talking about racial tokenism in class, I watched ESPN at home and began to think that there is more than just racial tokenism. ESPN has several women reporters and anchors on their shows including Hannah Storm, Linda Cohn, and the infamous Rachel Nichols, as well as several others. I realized ESPN talks about female sports for maybe a total of a five minutes a day, for WNBA Finals, the undefeated UCONN Women's basketball team, and Venus or Serena Williams. Although they talk very briefly about female sports, they have a comparably large number of female reporters.  Every time my mom sees a female reporter she complains about how revealing their clothes are, and that ESPN probably thinks they can attract male viewers by showcasing these women as objects of beauty. In addition, ESPN wants to appear a diverse network, and wants to appear un-biased towards women. ESPN goes out of their way to choose these female reporters. Some reporters, like Rachel Nichols, are not good at their job, but ESPN keeps these female anchors to to give the impression that they support gender diversity.