Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Podcasting the Grid: How Women in Motorsports Are Rewriting the Narrative
Transcript
- 0:00Breakfix's History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part
- 0:04by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the
- 0:07Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
- 0:11Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.
- 0:16An overview of motorsports podcasts focused on women by Mike Stokes.
- 0:21Modern technologies have expanded our ability to share
- 0:24a wide variety of interests.
- 0:25Motorsport, primarily focused on women in motorsport, has found
- 0:29social media as a medium to help grow actual participation numbers.
- 0:33Expanding on this theory, while also taking into consideration a
- 0:36later discussion on modern archival methods, this presentation will
- 0:39overview how podcasts surrounding women in motorsports are self
- 0:43presenting to the public at large.
- 0:45In particular, the thematic analysis of women's motorsport show
- 0:49descriptions and episode descriptions will be explored, with themes
- 0:53and expanded research discussed.
- 0:55Mike Stokes is the Assistant Director for the Department of
- 0:58Kinesiology and Senior Lecturer of Sport Management and Leadership at
- 1:02the University of New Hampshire.
- 1:04He is one of the founding members and Editor in Chief of the Journal
- 1:07of Motorsport Culture and History.
- 1:09Mike's recent works have included a co authored book chapter about the
- 1:12future of Formula One, as well as work surrounding big game hunting
- 1:15legislation on land preserves, an economic funding model for college
- 1:20athletics, and critiques on K 12 coaching certifications surrounding sexual assault.
- 1:25Mike will be talking about an overview of motorsport podcasts.
- 1:29Focused on women.
- 1:30Mike is one of our more important people with the Oregon Singer.
- 1:34He's also the Journal of Motorsports History.
- 1:37He's the, uh, publisher, editor, chief cook and bottle washer.
- 1:42Take it away, Mike.
- 1:43Good morning, everybody.
- 1:44Again, my name is Mike Stotes.
- 1:46I'm from the University of New Hampshire.
- 1:49Today's talk comes by way of a talk that really started last year by my colleague,
- 1:56Dan Simone, when Dan came up with a couple of other presenters and started to talk
- 2:03about Title IX women in motor sports.
- 2:06And one of the things that really stuck with me through last year's symposium
- 2:11and afterwards was, how do we make sure that women find or have space carved out
- 2:17for them within motor sports communities?
- 2:20And me being one of these sneaky millennials thought, well, we already
- 2:24probably have a spot for that.
- 2:26Heading back home.
- 2:27I was listening to one of these weird, freaky podcast things, and I thought, you
- 2:33know, there might be something to this.
- 2:35So the idea for this piece of original research kind of spurred
- 2:40from last year's conference.
- 2:42So some previous studies in motorsport that surround women suggest that
- 2:49in a lot of ways, coming back to Danica Patrick, as mentioned
- 2:52earlier by Mark Howe, a lot of media representations of women in motorsport.
- 2:58Are very over sexualized, rarely, at least in popular media, do they go into
- 3:04the finesse, the skills and capabilities there in in terms of podcasts themselves.
- 3:12Podcasts are heard.
- 3:14Worldwide can, in most situations, be downloaded and heard almost free of
- 3:21charge for many different providers.
- 3:23Some, there will be some sort of a fee associated with them.
- 3:27Some have advertisements for them.
- 3:29Really, it's a new phenomenon that occurred just after
- 3:33the turn of the millennium.
- 3:34For the study itself, what I decided to look into was podcast
- 3:41titles, not necessarily individual podcasts themselves, but podcast
- 3:47titles that circled around, namely, women in motorsport.
- 3:52So we'll get to why that's a little bit of a problem later on.
- 3:57But being an academic and how we got here, some of the background literature
- 4:03surrounding podcasts, podcasts have been used in a couple of different ways.
- 4:09In particular, sport is one of the most popular venues for podcasts
- 4:15to be housed within sport podcasts.
- 4:18Some of the previous literature suggests that sport podcasts can be used as a
- 4:25way to bring Folks from diverse, and in many instances, repressed groups,
- 4:33socially, economically, or otherwise.
- 4:36Other podcast literature suggests that podcasts today, when we think of K 12
- 4:43and even higher education, are being used as ways to help students learn.
- 4:49For example, one of my colleagues has a podcast dedicated solely to
- 4:54adapted physical education, so think Paralympics, Paralympic Games, in which
- 4:58he uses to re emphasize Key points from different lectures, classes, et cetera.
- 5:04And it has helped out tremendously with retention for his students.
- 5:08Lastly, within sport podcasts in particular, listeners self identify
- 5:13themselves as A, listening to podcasts to try and increase their overall
- 5:19knowledge for a particular sport podcast subset, but B, also self identify
- 5:24as being higher than your average intellect for a sport fan in that.
- 5:30So, meaning, if somebody were listening to, let's say, a basketball
- 5:33podcast, they would identify themselves as somebody who may know
- 5:37the NBA better than an average fan.
- 5:39To tie this in somewhat with the ideas I got from Dan's roundtable
- 5:44last year, I decided to go with a theory called archival theory, which
- 5:49archival theory is essentially how librarians in particular Choose which
- 5:56artifacts, be that books, collections, photography, video, digital media as well.
- 6:04What is represented in their library coffers?
- 6:07What are they spending money on to keep these things around and
- 6:11available for public consumption?
- 6:14One of the main critiques of archival theory is something that we'll talk
- 6:18about a little bit at the end, too.
- 6:20This idea called appraisal, and how we evaluate one piece of memorabilia
- 6:27or artifact versus another.
- 6:29And why we may keep one versus the other.
- 6:33Sternfeld, in particular, decided to expand on archival theory beyond
- 6:38your brick and mortar libraries and suggested that, hey, this wacky
- 6:42internet thing may actually be a good place to expand archival theory and
- 6:47start to look at more of a bottom up approach of what fans are wanting to
- 6:51listen to or find on the internet.
- 6:54Last off, the women in motorsports literature.
- 6:58Without beating a dead horse too much, very over sexualized representations of
- 7:04female athletes tended to occur up until and still today, but in particular it was
- 7:11a focal point of the 2010s in literature.
- 7:14Before we go into what all of these weird looking phrases are, I want to
- 7:20describe how we got the sample and kind of what that looks like for this study.
- 7:27The sample consisted of podcasts that falls under one general category that
- 7:33focuses solely on women in motorsport.
- 7:36What that means is A really, there weren't that many podcasts found from
- 7:43a general search of women in motorsport via Google in particular, seeing
- 7:48as how it is still the most popular search engine in the world and coming
- 7:53from a perspective of not being an intensely listening podcast consumer.
- 8:00Meaning that they may be fairweather and just seeing what's out there.
- 8:03Sure, we could have went through and used these same search terms through
- 8:08Google Podcasts, Spotify, and others.
- 8:11The way we wanted to attack this was from how a general consumer
- 8:15may try and find this information.
- 8:17So, some of the things that are left out.
- 8:20Danica Patrick's podcast, that may or may not be conspiracy theory laden, was
- 8:26left out because the focal point wasn't.
- 8:28necessarily on motorsport.
- 8:30Further, there are a number of different overarching podcast titles that may have a
- 8:37bunch of little subtitles underneath them.
- 8:40So for example, one of them in our data set.
- 8:45Women in motorsport hosted a variety of different shows that focused on women in
- 8:51motorsport, but from different angles.
- 8:54Similarly, there are other podcast titles that may have
- 8:57special once a month episodes that focus on women in motorsports.
- 9:02Those were not included in this, mostly because the main focal point,
- 9:08again, wasn't expressed in the title.
- 9:11And it could be a secondary type of interest for the host and podcasters
- 9:16getting to what's on the slide what we did and what we found was using a general
- 9:21search term, women in motorsport, we were able to find at first it was only five.
- 9:28Then it became eight, then it became 12, but at first a whopping five podcasts that
- 9:34fit a very general Google search criteria of the eventually 12 that we would find.
- 9:40We just stuck with the original five copied all of the descriptions.
- 9:46from each of the episodes, as well as the title, descriptions, et cetera, the
- 9:51show descriptions, et cetera, put them in a word document and did something
- 9:56called an inductive thematic analysis.
- 9:59So essentially what that is, after transcribing all of these
- 10:02things, we went through line by line and inductively reasoned that
- 10:09this line is suggesting X or Y.
- 10:13Afterwards, we went back through the entire data set one more time,
- 10:17went line by line through each of these combined related terms.
- 10:23And, we came up with general overarching themes and some sub themes therein.
- 10:29Alongside of that data collection, we collected how many episodes were under
- 10:34each title, which as you can see, vary greatly, from 8 all the way up to 197.
- 10:40From a Wendy's Were Published perspective, Women in motorsport was
- 10:46the longest tenured going back to 2016.
- 10:50All of our data collection ended roughly September of this year.
- 10:56Average run times.
- 10:57We also kept those as well.
- 10:59Some discussions that had with others about.
- 11:02Podcasts and how long a podcast should be range anywhere from five minutes
- 11:08for just quick bits, quick news bits, things of this sort all the way up to two
- 11:13hours if it's an in depth conversation here, we found that the average hovered
- 11:18just below 40 minutes per podcast.
- 11:21Obviously, there were some outliers, some of which included trailers, such as a
- 11:2730 minute snippet of, Hey, tune in when we're going to talk with such and such.
- 11:31Some of the results, on the left side of each of the following slides, are
- 11:36the themes that we generated, myself and a student that helped me out
- 11:41with this, named Caleb McChesney.
- 11:43We went through all of the data sets and By ourselves.
- 11:47Came up with these themes.
- 11:49Agreeing, disagreeing at parts.
- 11:51On the far side to me, you'll see a bunch of these word bubbles.
- 11:55These word bubbles were put together by a software called Lexamancer.
- 12:01Nowadays we think of a software such as Chatbot GPT that's been all over the news.
- 12:09Think of LexaMancer as sort of a dumbed down version of Chatbot GPT.
- 12:16Its main function is to find connections between different words.
- 12:21And the way that we use that, at least in qualitative research, is
- 12:25to help certify that what we're seeing is generally correct.
- 12:31From each of these, some of the data points were not sufficient.
- 12:37I will say that to be really verified VOX and answer, we could
- 12:41talk about that when we get there.
- 12:43We broke these down into different subsects being.
- 12:46The title and title descriptions and each of the individual podcast
- 12:51title and episode descriptions.
- 12:54This slide is the overall results of when we put all of the codes together
- 12:59across all of the titles, etc.
- 13:02So the major themes included on track elements.
- 13:05So here we're discussing racing.
- 13:08We're talking about rules.
- 13:11We're talking about results.
- 13:13We're talking about ingenuity, talking with racers, things of this sort.
- 13:18Career advancement was a very interesting one in that it
- 13:21happened in two different ways.
- 13:23You had racers and administrators within motorsport.
- 13:27We're talking about how they advanced to whatever position that.
- 13:31They eventually were in, be it chief engineer, CFO, CEO, things of this sort.
- 13:36And then some of it was career advice and almost like a networking opportunity.
- 13:42Next we had equity in motorsport.
- 13:45So this theme itself was more positive than it may come out on the slide.
- 13:51In that, sure, there were minor sub themes that suggested that equity in motorsport.
- 13:59Might actually be still a toxic environment, but overall equity
- 14:05and motorsport was talking more so about developmental opportunities
- 14:08in particular for women.
- 14:10Then we have show elements, which this one goes more into
- 14:13the nitty gritty of podcasts.
- 14:15So these would be things such as advertisements for an
- 14:19upcoming show talking about who they would be interviewing.
- 14:23A lot of times we would see.
- 14:26The hosts mentioned things that they were doing.
- 14:29So, for example, one of the major sub themes from a couple of
- 14:32different shows was the hosts would talk about, in particular, F1.
- 14:38They would talk about their experiences in going to Formula One race at Silverstone.
- 14:44Miami and others.
- 14:46Some minor things that we found in particular to the Women in Motorsport
- 14:50podcast were life away from the track.
- 14:53So what were folks doing behind the scenes, which ties in a lot with other
- 14:58more social media based sport research.
- 15:02A lot of early social media research suggested that people
- 15:05were getting involved at the time, mainly Facebook and Twitter.
- 15:08It's expanded now obviously to TikTok and others in that folks were getting
- 15:13on these platforms and following sports personalities because they had the chance
- 15:17of interacting with them and seeing what they were like without the helmet on.
- 15:22When they weren't in a car and then the last one life advice and struggles the
- 15:26one podcast women in motorsport Went on during the pandemic in which a substantial
- 15:32amount of that data set was geared towards Getting folks through the pandemic.
- 15:37Sorry if that brings up bad memories From just the grandiose podcast titles and
- 15:44podcast descriptions, the major themes that emerged from that were inspiration.
- 15:50A lot of times in this theme that they would talk about why racers.
- 15:56Particularly women would get involved.
- 15:58Why the hosts themselves wanted to get involved in this podcast elements, which
- 16:03we went over before social media, which was more so to help bolster other handles
- 16:09and such, such as Twitter handles, follow us on particular blogs or if they had a
- 16:15different host site and sustainability sustainability here, meaning green
- 16:20initiatives, things like formula E.
- 16:23So again, those were just the titles and now going into the
- 16:25specifics per podcast itself.
- 16:29So the themes that we saw in particular for the Females in Motorsport podcast were
- 16:36show elements, obviously talking about what would happen within this podcast.
- 16:42elements.
- 16:43A lot of times data from this portion would talk about things
- 16:48such as the politics of racing.
- 16:50So going behind the scenes of why certain opportunities were given versus not.
- 16:55And then career advancement, which we mentioned previously.
- 16:58Some of the on track elements were, if we look at the bubble slash Lexamancer
- 17:03part, we're tied in with STEM initiatives.
- 17:06Some STEM initiatives obviously tied in with sim racing, For girls
- 17:13on the grid again, we had show elements again, what's coming up,
- 17:18who's coming up, things of this sort.
- 17:19One of the most interesting elements from this data set included.
- 17:27Some of the career development aspects, including talking with and putting
- 17:32forward almost more so than others, administrators within motorsport who
- 17:38were women, including discussions with Sabre Cook, mechanical engineer and
- 17:45racer in the W Series or former W Series.
- 17:48Renee Winterbottom, who was a data engineer and Rami Mayer.
- 17:52As an engineer for triple a racing.
- 17:55So this podcast in particular almost went out of its way to find
- 17:59women in these spheres, almost as a way to try and inspire the next
- 18:04generation and show that women can be involved in motorsport as well.
- 18:09Girls across the grid.
- 18:11This one in particular podcast had the least amount of episodes available and
- 18:17published and was a little bit more.
- 18:22relaxed and conversational in tone.
- 18:26So some of the elements that we would see in particular for the show would be
- 18:32discussions about weekend activities.
- 18:35We'll put it that way.
- 18:37We also saw a little bit here of off track performances and off track activities
- 18:44Circulating around which Formula One racer was dating whom and such.
- 18:50Not really many interviews with that one.
- 18:53Then we had F1R for the girls.
- 18:56This one had many of the same elements that we saw in the beginning.
- 19:01But one of the bigger things that we did see from this one Was equity
- 19:08within motorsports and here we saw more of the negative themes of equity
- 19:14IE inequity start to pop up more We don't have the opportunity to advance
- 19:19in some of these Positions most of the formula one or similar drivers
- 19:23academies are not accepting women for X Y Z reasons Things of this sort.
- 19:29Then the biggest data set was the Women's Motorsport Network, which again
- 19:34had a variety of different shows here.
- 19:38The podcaster themselves would talk with a number of very interesting individuals
- 19:44that were almost motorsport adjacent and more car enthusiast adjacent.
- 19:49For example, a jeweler who would take cars from her husband's garage that were
- 19:57completely totaled and Would make jewelry out of the wreckage and try to paint it
- 20:03from factory original colors as well.
- 20:06So there was a lot of ingenuity there.
- 20:08We also saw in particular from this data set, more girls, i.
- 20:14e.
- 20:15Under 18 age 18 year olds getting involved not only as drivers But also in
- 20:21administrative roles such as doing things like play by play color commentary Calling
- 20:27the race in one instance an engineer So in this data set we saw a lot of very unique
- 20:35things life advice and struggles We went over a little bit in the beginning so
- 20:39I won't hammer that one Okay, so we got all this data, so what does this suggest?
- 20:46At the start of this project, to be very blunt, I thought that most of the
- 20:52podcast would turn out extremely negative.
- 20:55But overall, the vibe, if you will, was extremely positive, minus a few instances.
- 21:02Within archival theory, just being an academic for a second, We can see how
- 21:07in certain podcasts, in particular the ones that had the most episodes
- 21:12and were running the longest, we can almost see appraisal working in action.
- 21:18Appraisal here meaning how we evaluate one artifact versus another.
- 21:23How we evaluate one podcast versus another.
- 21:27The longevity very much suggests that they will still be around and that there is a
- 21:31fair amount of interest from listeners.
- 21:35A little bit of a deviation from previous sport literature that involves women.
- 21:40Our data suggested that there was a lot more talk around the
- 21:43technical aspects of the sport.
- 21:45Some of the other technical aspects not already overviewed.
- 21:48We talked about engineering a fair amount, but different race
- 21:51aspects too, and development.
- 21:53Things that we haven't necessarily seen in other sport related literature.
- 21:57And that there needs to be some sort of a push for greater access.
- 22:02We did see that in particular with STEM.
- 22:04Again, a little bit of a negative connotation, but it was usually coupled
- 22:08with some sort of positive aspect.
- 22:11Implications and future research.
- 22:13One of, again, the biggest limitations for this study was that we weren't
- 22:19able to capture every little bit.
- 22:22of women and motorsport related podcasts, be it individual
- 22:26episodes or even show titles.
- 22:29This limitation is more systemic and goes back to podcasts themselves.
- 22:34Within podcasts, you cannot necessarily put in what we call
- 22:39search engine optimization terms.
- 22:41In other words, how Google finds Certain websites and other elements.
- 22:46Those have not been fully integrated into podcasts as of yet.
- 22:52Now, the podcasts that we did find that didn't directly match the search term
- 22:57usually had a separate web page that worked as a housing unit that linked you
- 23:02to Here's where our podcasts are available on Spotify, Google Podcasts and others.
- 23:08In future research and in continuing with this, obviously getting those little
- 23:13remnants and finding out what's going on in more of your one off type episodes as
- 23:18well as the A little bit harder to find podcasts would absolutely be necessary.
- 23:25And one other consideration that we could have is interviewing or doing
- 23:30some sort of survey with podcast hosts or if available, their audiences to
- 23:35find out from a uses and gratifications lens why they find equity in
- 23:40listening to these podcasts and such.
- 23:43With that, we'll open it up for questions.
- 23:45Thanks for your attention.
- 23:48Thank you, Mike.
- 23:49Thank you, Mike.
- 23:50I feel somewhat qualified to ask this question.
- 23:53Please.
- 23:54You obviously focused on podcasts that entirely focus on, you
- 23:58know, women in motorsports.
- 24:00Do you think that perhaps if we are looking at where women have
- 24:04come, that maybe it's time to shift towards It's a focus on women as
- 24:09drivers, women as mechanics, not just for the sake of women as women.
- 24:13Yes, I totally 100 percent agree with you that we need to be focusing
- 24:17on the content of the competitor as opposed to their gender or sex.
- 24:22Absolutely.
- 24:23100%.
- 24:24And I think a lot of the literature that came out at the end of the
- 24:282010s suggested as such across all sporting types, not just motorsport.
- 24:33One of the, you know, reasons Janet Guthrie, you know, Denise
- 24:35McCogge were so successful is they viewed themselves as drivers first.
- 24:39But I would say, you know, obviously very interesting research.
- 24:42I'd love to see not just the cause, but also the effect looked into.
- 24:47So who are these podcasts reaching?
- 24:49Who is actually watching these podcasts?
- 24:51Is it younger women, women from their 30s to their 50s?
- 24:55What is the actual quantifiable success of these podcasts in
- 24:59getting women actually involved in motorsport and not just sort of.
- 25:03Qualitative research is more exploratory, if you will, right?
- 25:06So we're trying to break some ground in some area that hasn't
- 25:09really been looked at because we don't know what's going to happen.
- 25:12For the, who watches, or listens, watches if it's video one, definitely
- 25:18one of the future research areas could be surveying audiences for these major
- 25:24podcast titles for women in sport.
- 25:26That's where you would get the, how do you identify, age bracket.
- 25:31All of those like census questions that we all love taking so much, right?
- 25:35That would be one way that we could look into it.
- 25:37In terms of involvement and actionable items to get more
- 25:41women involved in sport, that one definitely goes way beyond podcasts.
- 25:45I will definitely say that, but I will say that podcasts probably will
- 25:49play at least a minor role in getting more women involved moving forward.
- 25:53in particular with the popularity of podcasts for your
- 25:57Two to 17 year old audiences.
- 26:01All right.
- 26:01Thanks again, everybody for your time.
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