Perhaps you could use your media position to bring paddling pool custard wrestling to a wider audience.

In my view it depends upon the sport ... (n.b. I'm not saying I like all these)

Athletics - women's events are taken very seriously, especially by athletics fans, Olympic year or not - a big tick for that one.
Tennis - disparity in pay but generally taken seriously - tick
Show jumping - tick

Rugby (either code), football, cricket - treated by most people as a novelty.
Boxing - many people don't even like the idea of women boxing.

So, I'd say it's mixed.


Among the journos though? ... oh dear.

What Mr Field referred to in his opening post: in my days as a sports ed, I made a point of trying to ensure that we carried things like fixtures lists for women's sport (mainly football and cricket), and of trying my damnedest to get reports and, where relevant, news items. It was a struggle to get such data.

Women's sport has, in many cases, suffered from years not simply of underinvestment, but active campaigns against it.

And there is general lack of understanding that women's achievement in, say, the 100m sprint, cannot be directly compared to men's achievement – but that that does not mean there are not serious record-breaking performances etc.

It's something that's also reflected in the number of female sports journalists. It is improving, but to give you an idea, when I was covering football regularly, it was incredibly unusual to have more than one woman in a press box at any time and, at Euro '96, I didn't see a single other women journalist at any of the 13 games I went to live, across the country. With RL, you might see one other woman at Wembley for the Challenge Cup – but she'd usually be doing 'the colour piece' rather than the actual report.

25 female nominations from 280.

What's that, about 9% of the total?

A woman boxer gets a couple of shouts though EB.

It doesn't help when you've got hugely-influential dinosaurs like Blatter suggesting that it would be better if women footballers dressed more like beach volleyball players. It also doesn't help when you see niminations for Rebecca Adlington, who by her own standards of 2010, would admit herself that she's had a quiet year, here nomination seems to have been more knee-jerk than well-considered

The whole SPOTY is a load of BBC bollox isn't it?
Something you may have enjoyed as a kid but escalates in cringeworthyness, annually.

Zara Phillips ffs.

Agreed, it's now similar to the televising of Children in Need, the Royal Variety Performance, Comic Relief, or Noel Wears a Hideous Jumper and Visits Sick Kids at Christmas - something that leaves you thankful for a myriad other channels to be watching

For me it comes down to is it an equal or better product than the male equivalent.

Womans football is vastly inferior as are most sports.

Tennis is a better product only because the men have mastered the game to a boring level of smashing the ball so hard the other guy can't return it which isn't what people want to see, there are no sports off the top of my head in which i think if both men and woman competed woman would actually be better.

To me that's what it comes down to, people want to see the absolute pinnacle of the people who compete in any sport, unfortunately it's usually men.

In a team sport think it is probable that a male team would always be physically at an advantage.
Single sports the same would apply for most with the exceptions that Women should be able to compete as equals in table tennis, Darts, pool, Snooker etc ( Not sure why they do not at the moment).
Probably easier for the BBC to have a Male SPOTY and a Female SPOTY.

Do you judge disabled sport only against male, abled-bodied sport? Do you not see that, in both, there are different pinnacles, and that both groups will achieve things within that situation – and both will provide entertainment within their situation. Or do you dismiss disabled sport on the basis that they don't compete with able-bodied males?

And I remember Garth Crooks being astonished at the standard of women's football when commenting on it at the Olympics some years ago. It can be very good – and that's against a background of women not having had the opportunities and encouragement to play for very long (in fact, their playing football being worked against), as with athletics (and other sports), where women have only very recently been able to compete in all events.