Speakers
Description
Women’s football has grown across the globe in the past decade including in relation to participation, professional leagues, salaries, and spectatorship. However this growth has been asymmetrical, especially when considering coaching and officiating roles. In the Australian context, football’s governing bodies have explicitly set 50/50 gender equality targets for the game, including refereeing. As part of a larger study examining the experiences of being a female football referee, this paper draws on auto-ethnographic data from the primary author’s refereeing journey, from novice to officiating matches. In particular we focus on the processes of becoming a referee; namely training, mentoring, support mechanisms, and being a match day official in community football. Following this we examine how these processes are experienced on a mental, physical, and emotional level and consider how taken-for-granted expectations about the culture of football, coupled with gendered notions of sporting knowledge, serve to create the conditions that normalize forms of gendered abuse simultaneously reinforcing refereeing as a masculine domain. Finally we discuss the shortcomings of models of social change, in this case gender equality, through sport that rely on individual agency and fail to address the hegemonic practices in place that perpetuate the status quo.
