The Politics of Positions of Sport Leadership: The Subtexts of Women’s Exclusion

Abstract

The percentage of women in sport leadership positions continues to be lower than in other sectors. This chapter discusses how resistance to women in leadership in sport manifests itself in implicit ways. Although current scholarship points to many dynamics that contribute to the current gender ratio, less attention has been paid to ways of implicit resistance to the presence of women in coaching and voluntary sport boards. We draw on discursive gendered subtexts and inequality regimes to explore this resistance. We specifically focus on the subtexts of three discursive practices used by sport organizations and analyze how they contribute to the continuation of the relatively low gender ratio in leadership positions and generally ignore intersectionality: (1) the construction of gendered qualifications for coaching positions in men’s and women’s sports; (2) the determination of the size and demographic of the quota in sport governance; and (3) the misogyny embedded in homonegative language and gendered hierarchy in sport that materially and ideologically devalues women. We conclude that although gender diversity is framed as a valuable goal by sport organizations, this frame will remain an empty ideology unless the ways prevailing discursive practices in sport are recognized, addressed, and radically changed.