Speaker
Description
Women’s committees (WCs) have been adopted by many international sports federations (IFs) as part of their efforts to address pervasive gender inequalities (Matthews & Piggott, 2021). Yet, despite their proliferation, little has been documented about the challenges such commissions face, about the conditions under which they can create change, and how they can avoid - as they are frequently criticized - of silo-ing women and making gender equality women’s work alone (Matthews 2021). WCs have also been called a “token gesture,” given they can be continually beset by roadblocks stemming from an IF’s internal politics (Krech et al., 2022). In this paper, we consider the potential of WCs to transform the gendered field relations of sport (Pape & Schoch, 2022). We investigate the case of two IFs - the federations of triathlon (World Triathlon) and hockey (FIH) - which have had a WC for 22 and 3 years respectively, relying primarily on 38 semi-structured interviews with key individuals. We show that while WCs are a strong symbolic gesture, providing an IF with the means to show that it duly recognizes the importance of gender equality, the structural location of the WC within a male-dominated governance structure significantly limits its impact. WCs tend to be advisory committees, with limited topic-specific expertise and little authority to take meaningfully decisions. Importantly, we show that WCs themselves are not the cause of these shortcomings, but rather the existing system of sports governance that tends towards reproducing the male-dominated status quo.
