Ban men from sports banter in the office? That’s sexist!

YOu’d need a heart of stone not to pity chaps confronted by the prim reproof of Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management institute. The lady says that employers should discourage men from talking about sport at work, because it might exclude women and lead to ‘laddish’ behaviour.

seems that any joyful reference to Ben stokes bagging a key wicket, or any harmless argument about whether VAR (video assistant referee) should be used only in the third-round ties at Arsenal’s stadium, makes women uncomfortable. They feel excluded.

sports banter and chat is a ‘gateway’ to worse male behaviour, Ms F reckons. Awful things like ‘slapping each other on the back and talking about their conquests’.

Come on, sisters! Let us join Tracey Crouch MP (a former sports minister) with a resounding: ‘get off!’ Let us get over ourselves and choose our battles more carefully.

granted, women being ‘comfortable’ at work is important: men must behave like proper humans where we are concerned, and increasingly they do so because laws, customs and public opinion are slowly grinding down any knobbly old ideas inherited from their whiskery ancestors.

But there are limits: we don’t want to turn colleagues into inoffensively neutral vanilla blobs, or cool their fine, hot sporting passions. We’ll settle for equal jobs, sensible respect, promotions when we deserve them, and offices that aren’t freezing bloody cold.

We want equal pay for equal work, and ask you to refrain from commenting on our bodies and keep your clammy paws off them.

it’s quite a wish-list, and some men are still struggling with it. But there our demands end: sports chat is just fine. Us WOMen are not made of spun-sugar and fairydust. We can get ‘ comfortable’ in all sorts of environments and, if we don’t, we’re more than capable of sighing and ignoring them.

it’s a Mum talent. if colleagues are upset about midfield ‘playmaker’ Christian eriksen leaving Tottenham, or gripped by an anomaly in the fourth-round cup tie, we can tune out.

even if a couple of the younger spirits decide to re- enact that deciding header or bat-handle bouncer in a corridor, using a filing tray and scrunched-up marketing memo, we can take it.

Or take revenge by starting a conversation about something ‘uncomfortable’ for them. diets. Jennifer Aniston. Ceramic hairdryers. The latest hotly disputed theory about whether or not you can wear cropped trousers with cowboy boots.

Or else just join in the conversation with intelligent questions and allow the poor, weary, overworked, commuting saps to feel knowledgeable by pretending you’re interested in the offside rule.

As a student, working as a temp telex operator, i tricked a manager at Tanqueray gordon & Co to fail to notice that i’d messed up a Pimm’s order by asking him to explain rugby.

it’s not only the sexism in Ms Francke’s statement that’s depressing; many women are every bit as passionate about sport as men — just as quite a few men are now more than happy to chat about babies, toddlers and playgroups and their wives’ afterbirths.

i admit, most sports news tends to wash over me. But i can see the appeal: it is less painful and important than politics or environmental worries, but it feeds stories, a constant human narrative fuelled by talent and hope and spectacle.

so, what happens is that when something is big — an Olympic final, a World Cup semi — i become a last-minute surfer, sneakily cadging a ride in the slipstream of fans’ enthusiasm.

i watch the last match and, if alone in the room, may be heard convincingly shouting, ‘get in!’ or, ‘go on my son,’ and hoping that england footballer dele Alli does that meerkat-leap of his to head the ball.

And if work colleagues happen to be mainly men, and fragile females feel ‘uncomfortable’ at the dreadful risk of a back-slap or a bit of male bonding, so what? Most of us are not that wet. And if we feel ‘excluded’ from some deep conversation about injury predictions in the six nations rugby, it may give us time to do a bit more work and get home with a clear desk.

Maybe i’m wrong, and young women (who have a lot to put up with, as the #MeToo movement has demonstrated) are getting more and more fragile about daft little offences like men talking incomprehensibly about sport.

As more workplaces are mixed, that feels a bit baffling to those of us who grew up in more maledominated ones.

When i was a producer and reporter on Radio 4’s Today programme in the seventies, the newsroom was once brilliantly described as ‘ a vast sea of old men in grey cardigans drinking soup out of paper cups’.

Walking through it was, for us girls in our wraparound cheesecloth skirts, a bit like going on safari. i am ashamed to say that some of us even quite liked being whistled at through their toothless old gums.

And distracting men with sports has advantages. Over at the World service during the 1972 Olympics, my techie job was in a cubicle beside the newsroom, editing Radio newsreel tapes, officially under supervision.

However, that was the year the Russian gymnasts exploded into brilliance. Remember Olga korbut and Ludmilla Tourischeva?

so, around the flickering blackand-white TV the men gathered, clutching their paper cups, gasping, shaking their heads. They weren’t exactly inappropriate, but occasionally one fellow would murmur something like: ‘Ohhh. They must have such powerful thighs to do that...’

The day of the final, i was ignored in my hutch and therefore edited, logged and filed a whole edition of From Our Own Correspondent all by myself. it felt very satisfying. Maybe that’s why i’ve had a soft spot for male sports banter ever since.