The Telegraph Cricket Podcast · The Telegraph

“Digs on your body type don’t have a place in sport” - Tammy Beaumont, Telegraph Women's Sport podcast

·51 min·3 clips

Girls as young as five feel they do not belong in sport, and only 30% of parents say sport is very important for daughters.

1. The Telegraph Women's Sport Podcast focuses on sexism in sport, with Laura Kenny linking track cycling, football, cricket, and women's leadership to one theme. 2. Laura Kenny hosts the episode, Stacey is a researcher who studies gender and sport, and Tammy Beaumont appears to describe discrimination from English cricket. 3. The episode asks whether sport can become truly equal when language, pay, media coverage, and governance still treat men as the default. 4. Laura says track cycling used labels like "man one" and "man two" before the language shifted to "P1, P2, P3, P4" after Kate Archibald questioned it. 5. Stacey says football reporting still says "United men" and "Women's World Cup," which shows how men's sport is treated as the norm. 6. Laura cites a fact that girls as young as five feel they do not belong in sport, and only 30% of parents call sport very important for daughters compared with 41% for sons. 7. Stacey argues that sport was built as a male space and that access, equipment, and boardrooms all reflected that history. 8. Laura says sport gave her teamwork, confidence, and leadership that school did not, and she wants the same benefits for her sons. 9. Stacey says the value of sport is not limited to elite medals because it also builds friendships, communication, and skills businesses want. 10. Stacey describes her research on FIFA Women's World Cups since 2015 and says 2015 was the first year BBC televised all of England's matches at the tournament. 11. Stacey says media has reduced infantilising language such as "girls" and "ladies," but she also sees more use of "lionesses" in football coverage. 12. Stacey says visibility after London 2012 helped women's sport, but backlash followed any move toward gender equality. 13. Laura says she has had allyship from male colleagues, but she also recounts being asked to take minutes while chairing a meeting. 14. Stacey says allyship matters because women are half the population, and she pushes back on the idea that women are underrepresented in society. 15. Laura cites BBC figures showing more than three quarters of British sportswomen earn less than £30,000 a year and more than four in 10 earn less than £10,000. 16. Stacey says the Barclays Women's Super League average salary is about £27,000, and she argues that football should aim for fair pay and a minimum standard before equal pay. 17. Laura says her sister once earned about £7,000 a year as a professional road cyclist while also working as a postie at 4 a.m., which made proper recovery and training impossible. 18. Stacey says only 21% of women surveyed felt encouraged to forge a path to the top, and she links that to the need for visible women in boardrooms and coaching. 19. The episode is a serious interview with back-and-forth reactions, research findings, and first-person examples from sport. 20. People interested in women's football, cycling, and sport governance will get the most from it, while listeners wanting light sports chat may skip it.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Telegraph Cricket Podcast