54 TIME March 15/March 22, 2021
KIM NG TOOK HER SEAT ON THE CHAR-
tered jet. As assistant general manager of
the Los Angeles Dodgers, she was join-
ing the team on a road trip in 2008. Soon
the Dodgers players started fi ling onto the
plane, and a fl ight attendant began tak-
ing drink orders from staff ers. When she
reached Ng— pronounced Ang, rhymes
with hang—the fl ight attendant leaned
in close. “So what did you do to get on
this plane?” she asked.
After nearly two decades in baseball
front offi ces, 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 fl ight 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, becom-
ing the fi rst female GM in the history of
major North American men’s pro team
sports and the fi rst East Asian American
to lead a Major League Baseball (MLB)
team. She had interviewed for GM posi-
tions 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 cele-
brated as a breakthrough with the poten-
tial 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
an annual report grading the hiring
practices of sports leagues—MLB most
recently got a C for gender hiring—hails
Nov. 13, 2020, the day that Ng’s new
position was announced, as the “most
note worthy day for baseball since Jackie
Robinson broke the color barrier in
1947.” Michelle Obama and Hillary Clin-
ton sent Ng kudos via Twitter; two of
Ng’s inspirations when she was growing
up, Billie Jean King and Martina Navra-
tilova, also cheered the enormity of the
moment on social media. On the night
of President Joe Biden’s Inauguration,
Ng even participated in the virtual fes-
tivities, sharing words from Ronald Rea-
gan’s 1981 Inaugural Address celebrat-
ing peaceful presidential transitions. “It
is unbelievable yet totally deserving that
Kim has ascended to a position of power,
infl uence and leadership,” King tells
TIME. “Kim Ng being a GM of a major
sports team is a strong indication that if
you can see it, you can be it .”
Women have made notable advances
across men’s sports during the past year.
In September, an NFL game was the fi rst
to feature female coaches on both side-
lines, Callie Brownson of the Cleveland
Browns and Jennifer King of the Wash-
ington Football Team, as well as a female
offi cial, Sarah Thomas, who would later
become the fi rst woman to referee in a
Super Bowl. In December, San Antonio
Spurs assistant coach Becky Hammon
became the fi rst woman to serve as head
coach in an NBA game when she took over
for her ejected boss, Gregg Popovich. And
Ng’s ascension is hardly the only sign of
progress in baseball: last summer, Alyssa
Nakken of the San Francisco Giants was
the fi rst woman to serve as an on-fi eld
coach in an MLB game, and in January,
the Boston Red Sox hired Bianca Smith
as a minor league coach, the fi rst Black
woman to coach in pro baseball history.
But the boys’-club stench lingers: in
February, the Los Angeles Angels sus-
pended pitching coach Mickey Callaway
after the Athletic reported accusations
that he made inappropriate advances to-
ward at least fi ve women in sports media;
Callaway has denied harassment. The pre-
vious month, the New York Mets fi red
general manager Jared Porter after ESPN
revealed that he had sent lewd photos anda barrage of unsolicited texts to a woman
working in media. “We need more women
in baseball,” Ng says. “I think that’s what
it points to.”
As the most visible female executive
in men’s sports, Ng can go a long way to-
ward shattering the outdated idea that
female leadership won’t translate in that
male- dominated world. At her introduc-
tory press conference, Ng, fully aware that
bad actors can point to one woman’s lack
of success as an indictment of all women
holding top decision making spots, said
that when she got the job, “there was a
10,000-lb. weight lifted off of this shoul-
der. And then after about half an hour
later, I realized that it had just been trans-
ferred to [my other] shoulder.” She ac-
knowledges that the burden isn’t fair. “But
it doesn’t matter,” she tells TIME. “That’s
just the way it is. In baseball, we talk aboutK
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