National Post - Financial Post Magazine
LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD
The professional sports world is getting a healthy dose of diversity as women move into the executive suites.
THE PROFESSIONAL SPORTS WORLD IS FILLED WITH INTERESTING CHARACTERS. MOST OF THEM IN ACTION ARE MEN, BUT A SMALL YET GROWING NUMBER OF WOMEN ARE ENTERING THE BUSINESS SIDE OF THINGS AS SPORTS-FOCUSED COMPANIES RECOGNIZE THEIR VALUE AND TRY TO APPEAL TO THE OTHER 50% OF THEIR POTENTIAL AUDIENCE
Moments after Bell Media announced it had hired Nathalie Cook to fill a new executive position at Canadian sports network TSN in late
2012, congratulatory messages began flooding her inbox. Internally, women were celebrating. “Oh my god! Finally,” they told her. “This is great.” Unbeknownst to Cook, she had just become the first female vice-president in the network’s almost 30- year history. “Now,” a colleague said to her, “they know it’s possible.”
But Cook always knew it was — and other adventurous women knew it, too.
Yes, men still overwhelmingly outnumber women among the top brass in the sporting world. But over the past five years, a group of women in Canada have climbed up the ladder to roles at the top of the professional and amateur game, or pretty close to it. Cook and others advocate for gender parity, but many of them dismiss quotas or regulation as a viable solution to getting more women in positions of power. They say a candidate’s competence matters more than their chromosomes. The scale will tip in due time as more women start believing that they can lead and gain the relevant experience to prove it.
Cook credits her ascension to a bit of “right place, right time” fortuitousness, but mostly to her gumption to doggedly “ask for things,” a trait she says eludes many females she has encountered in sport. Over the years, Cook says almost all of the people who’ve proactively broadcasted their personal goals to her and mapped the path they’ve conceived to get them there have been men. She’s often had to start these conversations for her female staffers. Women, in many cases, have worked just as hard, but they’ve waited for someone else to recognize, reward and promote them, only for that progression to happen slowly or even never.
But public attitudes, at least, are changing across the corporate landscape. Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella was lambasted in October for telling a room full of women that if they want a raise, trust the system and their good karma will get them one rather than just asking. Hewas later forced to apologize and retract his statement and many condemned his advice, though it did add fuel to the equal pay debate and got people talking about it again. But talk is cheap. As any athlete knows, it’s the results that count and you can’t win if you don’t play. “You have to put yourself forward,” Cook says. Two years ago, Cook wasn’t waiting around for a headhunter to phone her about a vacant job. That’s happened only once in her career, despite having what she calls a “pretty good” résumé. She did what many women don’t: she asked.
After a four-year run in a senior position with Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, Cook set her sights on earning a seat at TSN’s top table. Before she left for the Summer Games in London two years ago, she met with the company’s president to inquire about getting her own chair when she’d be out of work in the fall — and she got it as the network’s first vice-president of integrated marketing and partnerships. “If you want it, you have to go get it,” says Cook, who is now TSN’s vice-president of sales and brand partnerships. “You actually have to ask. I’ve learned that from my male counterparts.”
Unlike coaching and managing, which share a paucity of women, the business side of sport in Canada has evolved from the boys club it once was. During the 1980
81 hockey season, for example, the only woman listed on the Maple Leaf Gardens Ltd. masthead was secretary Pam Gordon. Today, there’s gender diversity in the junior ranks as more women who are sports fans graduate, apply for entry-level jobs and get hired. Kim Carter, the head of human resources at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., says women are just as likely as men to vie for these jobs and espouse the values that the company prizes, including a fierce work ethic, a winning attitude and the willingness to be a part of a team. “For us, the ideal candidate is the person who most closely matches those values regardless of sex,” she says. “That creates a level playing field for everybody.”
It’s taken longer, but front offices have made modest progress, too. There are two women on MLSE’s 16- person leadership team and one on its eight-person board. Despite being MLSE’s lone female director, Mary Ann Turcke says she feels “respected, involved and equal.” Turcke, who was just appointed to group president of local and