Title IX didn’t just open doors for women in sports. It also provided opportunities for women to have careers in sports media.

Tom Hoffarth of the Los Angeles Daily New has done a terrific package to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Title IX. Friday, he did a column ranking the top 40 women in sports media. He placed trailblazer Donna de Varona No. 1.

Said de Varona:

My work in Title IX gave me a voice I wanted to have as a broadcaster. But there was a lot of pushback. My visibility was often threatened. I often got comments about my activism being an issue, forcing me to make choices. That did two things for me: It made me fight harder and stay at ABC, and also to work on Capitol Hill.”

Tom also did a series of interviews, asking prominent women in sports media what Title IX meant to them. Here’s the link to Tom’s blog. Just scroll down a bit to get the interviews.

From Lesley Visser:

Billie Jean (King) didn’t just give me a chance, she gave every woman in this country the chance. The Globe made the first woman to cover the NFL as a beat, and when the credentials came (in 1976), it said — get this — “no women or children in the press box.” There were no ladies rooms, because, of course, there were no women!

From Sally Jenkins:

Title IX affected me as a sportswriter because I was maybe one of only a few who began as an intern in 1982 and there were so few out there. Leslie Visser, and maybe a couple of others. But she was having to deal with covering the NFL and having a player like Terry Bradshaw sign an autograph for her when she tried to interview him because he didn’t know better.

It affected me to broaden the range of acceptable professions for females and decide what was the appropriate conduct for women. There were times when I was working at Sports Illustrated, even in the 1990s, well after the passage of Title IX, when I was arguing for a feature story on Jackie Joyner Kersee. The editor said to me: If it’s a choice between her or Michael Jordan, we’ll do a piece on him every time. But why is it a choice? Why can’t we do both? Even as late as the mid ’90s, and sometimes today, women in sports has this underpinning attitude that it comes at the expense of the male’s expense. For Sports Illustrated to do a Jackie Joyner Kersee story was somehow depriving the male athlete of space. That was the attitude. It’s a very unconscious bias but very persistent and needs to be addressed still.

From Mary Carillo:

I was fortunate that the men I worked for kept giving me the chance to do more; virtually all my bosses were men, and still are. It’s not always easy to make your way through an environment that is so male centric, but I’ve had the chances to try a lot of things.  What came my way did not even exist when I started out in sports television.

But I always tell young kids, especially young women who are interested in this sort of work: if you are asked whether you can do something, cover something, bring back a story — say yes. Then go after it with everything you’ve got. And more than anything, support one another.

Madeline Albright says there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help one another. I believe that with all my heart. All the boats need to rise. Title IX was the first step to an even playing field.

And there’s much more. Take a look.