Sylvia Chase, an Emmy Award-winning correspondent whose professionalism and perseverance in the 1970s helped a generation of women infiltrate the boys club of television news, died on Thursday in Marin County, Calif. She was 80.

Her death was confirmed by Shelley Ross, a former network news colleague, who said Ms. Chase had undergone surgery for brain cancer several weeks ago.

Ms. Chase was one of a number of correspondents hired by network and local television news departments — along with Connie Chung, Cassie Mackin, Marya McLaughlin, Virginia Sherwood, Lesley Stahl and others — at a time when women were striving to be taken seriously and to defy being typecast as eye candy for male viewers.

While they had been preceded a decade earlier by pioneers like Marlene Sanders, Ms. Chase and her contemporaries were members of a freshman class still more concerned with getting into broadcast news on the ground floor than worried about being passed over for promotion later on because of a glass ceiling.