What it was like being a woman at Sky Sports in the Gray-Keys era

Culture change is the hardest problem to solve, surely?
It’s the bit of the puzzle where you’re asking people to fundamentally alter their worldviews, or in some cases even their personal identity. And try as we sometimes might, that stuff travels with us when we go to work.

My conversation with the broadcaster and journalist Lynsey Hooper wanders in to the culture at Sky Sports, then and now. The subject came up because Lynsey started getting work at Sky in the Andy Gray, Richard Keys days.

To listen to her stories, you’d think this was the 1970s rather than the noughties. Then you wonder, does anything really ever change?

The Offside Rule podcast was created out of this era at Sky, when Lynsey, Hayley McQueen and Kait Borsay would regularly catch up in between shifts and swap anecdotes - some of which are relayed in our podcast.

We all know how Gray and Keys ended up leaving Sky; It’s the moment that divides then and now in our imagination. Today’s Sky we like to think, is a different place, more enlightened (albeit a low bar which is defined by not overtly abusing women in the workplace). Gray and Keys are no longer there, banished to Qatar, and Alex Scott has taken their place as one of the faces of the station’s football coverage. Then/now: It’s a nice neat story, with a beginning, middle and end. And I hope it's true.

But the problem with using stories to describe real life is that in the latter there is no end. To imagine sexism as just another management problem to deal with is absurd. It will never go away and to think otherwise is to invite complacency. It’s great that Sky made changes, and as we say on the pod, Barney Frances should be credited with taking some really hard decisions that had a potentially harmful commercial impact. Sacking two big names takes guts. But it wasn’t the end of the story.

People in the 1970s used to look back and laugh at the behaviour of their parents friends in the fifties. What we’ll make of 2019 in twenty years time doesn’t bear thinking about. Progress is gradual, it ebbs and flows, two steps forward etc.

Lynsey, Hayley and Kait used to call their pod ‘The Offside Rule (We Get It)’.

They’ve dropped the last bit, because it started to feel a bit try hard. Of course they get it.