Leveling the playing field

KIM NG TOOK HER SEAT ON THE CHARTERED jet. As assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, she was joining the team on a road trip in 2008. Soon the Dodgers players started filing onto the plane, and a flight attendant began taking drink orders from staffers. When she reached Ng—pronounced Ang, rhymes with hang—the flight attendant leaned in close. “So what did you do to get on this plane?” she asked.

After nearly two decades in baseball front offices, Ng had become accustomed to the condescending glances, outright hostility and attempts at intimidation that come with being the only woman in the room. But this was, well, something else entirely. So Ng decided, as she had so many times in her professional life, to have some fun with the situation.

“Do you really want to know?” Ng said conspiratorially, teasing a salacious secret.

“Yeaaah,” the flight attendant replied, barely containing her enthusiasm.

“See all these guys?” Ng said.

“Yeaaah.”

“They all work for me,” Ng said.

Speaking during a video interview from a hotel room in Miami where she had been staying for the past month or so, Ng laughs recalling this conversation. “She slinked away,” Ng says. “The point was, Why are you asking me this?”

Ng was named the general manager of the Miami Marlins in November, becoming the first female GM in the history of major North American men’s pro team sports and the first East Asian American to lead a Major League Baseball (MLB) team. She had interviewed for GM positions at least 10 times over the years, only to be passed over for someone else. But her hiring by the Marlins was not just a personal victory—it was widely celebrated as a breakthrough with the potential to place more women in traditionally male power roles, in baseball and beyond.

Richard Lapchick, whose Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida publishes