Presenter Gabby Logan says she's "enormously proud" of the role she has played in increasing female visibility in sports - but concedes there's still work to be done to combat gender inequality.
Logan, 50, is one of the most respected broadcasters in the industry, having first ventured into TV in 1998, presenting ITV's On the Ball. Over the course of her career, Logan has also worked for the BBC, Sky Sports and Amazon Prime, covering major sporting events including the World Cup and Olympics.
In recent weeks, she's been one of the faces of the BBC's Womens World Cup coverage and has now opened up about the realities of being characterised as a woman struggling to succeed in a male dominated environment.
“There was a point about fifteen years ago where I was like, “OK enough now!”. There's loads of women around," Logan said, speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live's 'How Do You Cope?...with Elis and John'.
"Let's just address the elephant in the room that we're kind of beyond this. We can stop talking about this, but when I get introduced somewhere, it still gets mentioned in my intro but I suppose I was one of the first to do what I do. Not THE first, but certainly in football, I did some firsts.
“If you are at the vanguard of something you can’t undo that and now as a fifty year old I'm enormously proud to have been part of that change and I see such incredible female broadcasters across, so many sports now and that's brilliant and so it should be inclusivity across the piece.
“There is still so much more injustice in society to do with being a woman…whether it's medical things that are not available to women, or the way there is still a gender pay gap."
While Logan believes there has been plenty of progress made in terms of increasing female visibility in sport, one issue she and her colleagues still have to navigate is social media abuse, with Football Focus presenter Alex Scott, in particular, having had to contend with vitriol online.
“People like Alex have had a lot of abuse on social media and other women as well… That's just really rubbish to have to deal with isn't it?," Logan said.
“I think I feel quite, especially with Alex and the girls at the BBC that I work with now, especially in women's football. I definitely feel like I'm that I'm the kind of the mother figure in lots of ways because I'm so much older than lots of them. So I do feel that when they talk to me. I feel I have to kind of try and offer advice or try and soothe any kind of feelings they might have about any negativity."
She added: “I feel really grateful that I started my career without social media because I think the first eight to ten years of doing what I did there was no opportunity.
“I was so lucky that by the time I put my name into a search engine I had a bit of thick skin that had formed and I was quite confident about myself, or reasonably confident.”
Logan also opened up about mental health and the struggles her dad - former Wales boss Terry Yorath - faced after the death of her brother Daniel. Daniel was only 15 years old when he died from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, something Logan says has had a lasting impact on her family.
Show your support for The Lionesses throughout the FIFA Women's World Cup with the latest England home shirt. Mixing the classic with the contemporary, this shirt is being worn by the team as they bid to add a World Cup to their incredible European Championship triumph in 2022.
“You're allowed to feel how you are feeling, but expressing it, which I feel like my dad didn't, and that's a product of the time that we lived in in the early nineties, where these conversations about mental health would be nowhere near as prevalent and he was this big hard footballer, who'd had this reputation for being a hard man. He couldn't express his feelings," Logan said.
“He was in that very high profile job. And had a big task of trying to take Wales to a football World Cup for the first time, which he got very close to, although they failed at the last hurdle. I think that was probably where a lot of his demons came home to roost.
“Daniel adored Wales' Football team. He was buried in a Welsh football kit and when Wales didn't qualify. I think that was where everything really got too much for him.”