Sexism in the media

One of the things I occasionally do is watch the start of the Sydney-Hobart yacht race - which I used to do on telly, and now - if I do - I use the YouTube live cast. In recent years, I'm not finding this as interesting as it used to be: the broadcast has less of the pre-race manoeuvring, and tends to focus on the rich end of an often rich fleet - the maxis that are fast and spectacular, and compete for line honours - which is NOT winning the race, as the race is a handicap race to give smaller boats a chance as well.

There was a little coverage of the smallest boat in this year's fleet, which has an annual budget of $4,000, which was good, but there wasn't enough of that tail end and middle of the fleet human interest, in my opinion.

The commentary was a bit of a mixed bag, from the sailing point of view (I think Iain Murray commentated one year, and I think that year the explanation and graphics were the best they'd ever had), but what really got my goat was the sexism of one of the presenters - their camerawoman was reduced to being a cameragirl, women on the all-female crew boat were "girls", not women, and there was an obvious pause in the middle when he tried to say helms ... woman.

It's the 21st Century. I know sailing has and probably still has problems with women being participants rather than running the canteen - and the media still clearly has problems, but can you not find someone who can pronounce helmswoman correctly (and why, Blogger, do I have to add that the dictionary)?