Barstool Sports: A Female Run Misogynistic Company?
Image being the female CEO of a digital media company worth an estimated $100 million that is consistently criticized for being misogynistic. Meet Erika Nardini the Chief Executive Officer of Barstool Sports.
Barstool Sports was founded in 2003 as a weekly newsletter focused on sports and gambling. It has since evolved into an irreverent lifestyle, sports, and pop culture digital media powerhouse. And yet, with a female at the helm, Barstool is still portrayed as a company that promotes gender inequality. Founder Dave Portnoy remains as Chief of Content, and is often at the center of the criticism for championing the company’s politically incorrect culture. Among a litany of Portnoy’s offenses are comments like his claim that any woman who is a size six and wears skinny jeans deserves to be raped and his statement that ESPN sportscaster, Sam Ponder, is a “f-king slut” whose only job is to “make men hard”.
Blatant misogyny aside, many of the company’s top personalities—such as Dan “Big Cat” Katz, Eric “PFT” Sollenberger, Kevin “KFC” Clancy, and even Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez—are the type of bro-ey men-children who have nicknames as adults. Barstool’s oldest fans, known as “Stoolies,” are mostly 18-to-34-year-old men who behave in a manner consistent with an alternative interpretation of their moniker. But a deeper look into the company reveals an undeniable female presence.
Nardini has had to defend her company against the media flack on more than one occasion. She recently tweeted, “Female leadership team, #1 female podcast in the world, break out female stars, 60%+ female audiences on new platforms.” And she is right. The company’s C-Suite is made up of predominantly women; and with the rise of podcasts and social media, Barstool has seen an uptick in popularity, especially with women. Their second most popular podcast has a 70 percent female audience.
That podcast, referenced in Nardini’s tweet, is Call Her Daddy. It currently holds a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and is consistently featured in Apple’s Top Podcasts chart. Their YouTube channel has 140,000 subscribers. The show, hosted by Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklin, puts the girls in the place of power, exploiting their personal lives to make fans feel better about their own sexual mishaps. Chicks in the Office, another female hosted podcast, video series, and Sirius XM radio show, centers on pop culture and celebrity gossip and targets female audiences. Their Instagram has over 400,000 followers. In November of 2018 the website fully embraced their growing female-driven content and decided to split their main site into two sections: Barstool Sports and Barstool Chicks. And since the divide, Chicks has accounted for about 25 percent of the sites monthly views, according to Yahoo Finance.
Women are not only thriving under the “Chicks” umbrella at Barstool, either. Sports broadcaster Kayce Smith left NBC in 2018 to join the namesake section of the company. And when her former employer published an article perpetuating Barstool’s misogyny and masculinity, Smith was quick to bark back, proclaiming via Twitter that references in the article to misogyny at Barstool are “both WILDLY inaccurate and disrespectful.”
Barstool gained notoriety for discussing things guys enjoy talking about: sports, comedy, and girls. And Nardini is aware of that. She lives with the hate the company often receives, feeling that creative license and conflict are what make the non-PC media company special. So when Deadspin referred to Nardini’s hire—she beat out 74 men for the position—as a way to “launder” Barstool’s image, she told the New York Post that is “the most sexist thing of all.”