ABSTRACT
In December 2020, Amazon Prime men's football pundit Karen Carney offered a lukewarm assessment of Leeds United, speculating that the club's promotion to the English Premier League earlier that year was aided by a period of rest resulting from the coronavirus shutdown. In response, Leeds’ official Twitter account called Carney out by tweeting a video of her commentary and listing some of the club's achievements prior to the shutdown. What appeared to be a harmless gesture by the club proved to be a catalyst for a wave of online harassment hurled toward Carney. Although Leeds’ owner doubled down on the account's negative assessment of Carney's commentary, others argued that Leeds and its owner had encouraged the abuse being hurled at Carney. This controversy begged the question: what responsibility do sports clubs have in ensuring women in sports media are not harassed online, even when those women offer sports opinions that may be disagreeable? In this chapter, we call upon Harrison's and others’ previous work on the treatment of women in sports media to answer this question and critically analyse this case. Given the well-documented persistence of gendered online harassment against women in sports media, we argue prominent social media users would do well to take an approach to this issue that seeks gender equity rather than equality. Through a nuanced approach to engaging online those women who cover men's sports, we may begin to address the structures that contribute to the marginalization of women in those contexts.
