Speakers
Description
A significant body of knowledge has tried to explain a lack of significant change in gender ratios in sport leadership/ governance positions. Current research may have insufficient explanatory power to fully identify how sport leadership and governance remain a male domain. Yet, a review of the contributions and influence of social theory to understanding gender inclusion/exclusion in sport leadership/governance is missing. Such a review could contribute to an improved understanding of the workings of gender/ gender power relations by providing an in-depth discussion of dominant theoretical perspectives within the field and highlight gaps in these perspectives. We present a review of how the gendering of positions of leadership in sport organizations has been theorized in leading sport sociology journals between 2015 and 2021 and chapters in edited books (2017-2022) that have an empirical sociological focus. We discovered 44 such papers/chapters and mapped their theoretical lens. We discuss the contribution that the use of different theoretical approaches drawn upon in these papers has made to understanding gender inclusion within sport organizations and suggest other theoretical lenses that could be used to provide new insight into organizational practices that contribute to the production of gender inequity and exclusion in sport organizations.
