Speakers
Description
This paper offers to reconceptualize the gender dynamics of international sport governance in order to better understand the underrepresentation of women in leadership. It considers how the actions of international sports federations are shaped by the broader field of sports governance within which they are nested. We investigate the case of the International Cycling Union (UCI), which is an interesting case because of how it straddles two spaces of elite sports participation: the Olympic Movement, where gender inequality has become a priority cause including in relation to leadership; and professional road cycling, as exemplified by the Tour de France, which constitutes its own universe of actors and remains highly gender unequal and relatively uninterested in change. The actions the organisation takes in relation to gender equality are always contingent upon the current state of play within these fields of governance, which are shaped in turn by masculinity and male dominance. In this communication, we investigate how this complex web of organisational relationships and uneven commitments impacts the gender equality actions of the UCI and particularly the progression of women within international cycling leadership. We rely on 21 semi-structured interviews with key individuals of the UCI and the analysis of diverse textual materials (media, policies, meeting minutes). Building on Connell’s (1987) concept of gender regimes, and Fligstein and McAdam’s (2015) theory of strategic fields, we show that gender and sports scholars interested in explaining women’s under-representation in leadership positions have much to gain from taking a gendered field approach.
