This excerpt from the book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back: Dilemmas of the Modern Fan, by Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson, is presented with permission from University of Texas Press, Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved.

One of the main reasons that devoted sports fans may not feel welcome is that so much of the coverage is created by a specific subset of our population: namely white men, most of them straight, the vast majority cisgender. In fact, the homogeneity of sports media cannot be overstated.

And even though all media suffer from a lack of diversity, especially as we move up the chain into more powerful, decision-making positions, sports has a poor record on this —perhaps the worst.

In 2017, the Women’s Media Center (WMC) found that 89 percent of sports coverage is written by men. Of the sixteen categories of news topics that WMC counted, sports had the largest concentration of male reporters, followed most...