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PhD scholar Aoife Sheehan and Dr Kathryn Hayes, Associate Professor in Journalism, presented findings from their paper - Visible yet Vulnerable: Gender, Precarity and Women Pundits in Irish Sports Media - at the Future of Journalism Conference in Cardiff. 

Now in its 10th year, the conference was hosted by Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Media and Culture bringing together leading scholars and researchers in the field. The theme of this year’s conference, Conflicting Journalisms: Resistance, Struggle, and Prospects, reflected some of the many complex challenges facing journalism today. 

Among the presentation themes explored at this year’s conference was gender, with Dr Hayes and Aoife Sheehan discussing the experience of women pundits in Irish sports media, examining how they navigate precarious freelance working conditions, how their expertise is performed, contested, and scrutinised in the context of men’s sport, and what these dynamics reveal about gendered audience reception and the sustainability of women’s participation in sports media. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with women working as pundits, analysts, and co-commentators in Irish sports media, the study focuses on their roles covering men’s sport positions that remain the most contested and precarious. In doing so, it posits whether punditry itself should be understood as a form of precarious labour. 

Contrary to public perceptions of punditry as high-status work often linked with wealthy former athletes, the Irish context reveals a different reality: for most participants, punditry was insecure, casualised work layered on top of other employment, with minimal contracts, inconsistent pay, and unpaid preparation. Using a feminist critical lens informed by Banet-Weiser’s (2018) concept of popular feminism and its entanglement with popular misogyny, the paper explores how women’s heightened visibility operates as both opportunity and constraint. 

While participants were invited as “experts,” their authority was continually contested, requiring them to perform credibility through excessive preparation, self-presentation, and emotional regulation. Their visibility exposed them to heightened online harassment, gendered audience reception, and tokenistic inclusion, reinforcing the paradox that expertise alone does not secure legitimacy. The findings suggest that visibility without structural support reinforces precarity, discouraging some from pursuing punditry or broader careers in sports media. By centering the underexplored experiences of female pundits, the study advances debates on precarity and gender in journalism, raising critical questions about credibility, authority, and the sustainability of women’s participation in sports media.