Women are severely underrepresented in the Denver, national and global sports industries. With only 13 of the 192 voting members of the World Athletic Constitution being women, the gender gap is hard to miss in the sports world. Denver residents have taken it into their own hands to encourage women to look at having a career in sports.Â
Jasmine Tong, vice president of Denver Women’s Sports Collective, recalls not seeing many women in the sports industry growing up.
“It’s almost night and day from being a kid to the past three or four years, seven years,” Tong said. “In the past three or four years, it’s just exploded.”
Tong said that in the past few years, the growth in representation for women in the sports industry has been exponential. Within the 31 professional sports federations, 26.9% of executive members are women as of 2023, which is up from 8.6% in 2019.
“It’s been really amazing to see the amount of coverage that women are getting and having their actual stories be told as an athlete,” Tong said. “I’ve also seen the representation on the business side grow.”
Girls in the Game is a new free event hosted annually by CBS Colorado to inspire young women to pursue a career in sports. The event, held on Saturday, August 17, inside Hamilton Gymnasium on the Denver University Campus, aimed to pique the interest of the hundreds of women in attendance in sports. The event brought together dozens of athletic organizations, as well as Denver-based media and business conglomerates, to promote women in sports.
This included people like Tong, who started her sports career as an athlete after growing up playing volleyball and enrolling in a Division III college in California. During her time at Whittier College, Tong completed numerous internships in the sports industry.
“That was sort of the best way to see if that’s what you enjoy and if this is really what you want to do,” Tong said. “Business [jobs] sports [are] so broad, you can do marketing, finance events. So I just tried a bunch of stuff and then eventually it brought me to the US Olympic Committees in the Springs.”
After Tong’s work interning with the United States Olympic Committee, she stayed in Colorado and began working for the Denver Women’s Sports Collective, an organization meant to help women in the sports world connect and network.
CBS executives invited Tong and the Denver Women’s Sports Collective to the Girls in the Game event. Romi Bean, CBS Colorado’s lead sports anchor and reporter, and CBS leaders such as Elaine Torres recognized the need for a Girls in the Game event in the Denver community. Bean says she supports the event’s mission of giving girls the chance to learn more about the sports industry.
“I’ve always had a dream; I’ve wanted to do this to give girls an opportunity to explore all of the careers in sports,” Bean said. “I never had this available to me as a girl and there’s so many incredible women here with such incredible jobs that people just don’t know about.”
Bean developed a love of sports as a child while attending Denver Broncos games with her father. The anchor unconventionally started her journalism career. Bean first went to business school and felt like something was vacant in her professional life.
“After trials and errors and realizing I was missing something in my life,” Bean said. ”There wasn’t enough sports in my life.”
Bean’s journey to sports broadcasting was difficult. Self-doubt flooded Bean’s mind when she got her first job in sports radio. Bean felt a strong sense of responsibility to succeed because she knew female representation in the sports industry was limited.
“I started late so I felt like I didn’t have a ton of opportunities, a ton of outlets, and I felt like I got to do this right and I got to ace this on the first try or I’m going to fail,” Bean said. “I got my first opportunity in radio and I felt like there was so much pressure because it felt like if I fail, now am I too old to try again?”
That’s why Bean was passionate about helping make opportunities for women in the sports industry more accessible.
“I always wanted to create something to pay it forward and to give girls an opportunity to explore the millions of ways they can get into sports,” Bean said.