By SKDK’s Jennifer Cunningham, Samantha Levine and Nell Callahan
Over the weekend one of us accidentally retweeted the story about the Corey Codgell headline debacle — “Wife of a Bear’s Lineman Wins a Bronze Medal” — with the hashtag Katinka Hosszu. A communications professional wouldn’t ordinarily make an error like that. But it never occurred to us that members of the media had twice celebrated the husbands of different women Olympians.
It shouldn’t have happened once.
You know what else shouldn’t have happened? Swimmer Katie Ledecky — after winning the gold medal and beating her own world record — being referred to as the female Michael Phelps.
It’s tempting to condemn this dismissal of women’s success as deliberately hostile but the trend actually reflects a deeper, more insidious worldview: the media simply does not take women and our triumphs — particularly in sports as — seriously as those of men.