"Sports? But why?" The questions were countless; bordering on puzzlement each time yours truly uttered the area of preference for her first job. Those were our early days, as we took baby steps in the big, bad world of journalism. Slowly and surely, we discovered the reasons for those multi-layered queries.

As a 21-year-old negotiating the uncharted world of sports journalism nearly two decades ago, every day was like baptism by fire in a male-dominated section of the newspaper. While our reporting head and the editor were both pro-women in every sense of the term and never showed any bias, the veiled barbs and dismissive behaviour by male colleagues within the team and beyond is what made us realise that nobody was really ready to believe that women understood sport, let alone be taken seriously to have a grip over any discipline, single-handedly.