On the Periphery: Examining Women’s Exclusion from Core Leadership Roles in the “Extremely Gendered” Organization of Men’s Club Football in England

Bryan, Amée; Pope, Stacey; Rankin-Wright, Alexandra J.

doi:10.1177/08912432211046318

On the Periphery: Examining Women’s Exclusion from Core Leadership Roles in the “Extremely Gendered” Organization of Men’s Club Football in England

Bryan, Amée; Pope, Stacey; Rankin-Wright, Alexandra J.

Authors

Amee Bryan amee.gill@durham.ac.uk
PGR Student Doctor of Philosophy

Professor Stacey Pope stacey.pope@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Alexandra J. Rankin-Wright

Abstract

This paper frames men’s club football as an “extremely gendered” organization to explain the underrepresentation of women leaders within the industry. By analyzing women’s leadership work over a 30-year period, we find that women’s inclusion has been confined to a limited number of occupational areas. These areas are removed, in terms of influence and proximity, from the male players and the playing of football. These findings reveal a gendered substructure within club football that maintains masculine dominance in core football facing leadership roles and relegates women to a position of peripheral inclusion in leadership roles. Through a discourse analysis of gender pay gap reports, we show that men’s football clubs legitimatize women’s peripheral inclusion by naturalizing male-dominance at the organizational core. These findings are significant as they demonstrate that men’s football clubs, as masculine conferring organizations, have excluded women from core roles in order to maintain their masculine character while superficially accepting women into roles that do not challenge the association of football with hegemonic masculinity. As such, organizational change may only be possible if women are granted greater access to core organizational roles. This paper offers a new theoretical framework for “extremely gendered” organizations that can be applied to other sporting and male-dominated contexts to analyze women’s access to core leadership roles.

Citation

Bryan, A., Pope, S., & Rankin-Wright, A. J. (2021). On the Periphery: Examining Women’s Exclusion from Core Leadership Roles in the “Extremely Gendered” Organization of Men’s Club Football in England. Gender & Society, 35(6), 940-970. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432211046318

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Feb 8, 2021
Online Publication Date	Sep 27, 2021
Publication Date	2021-12
Deposit Date	Feb 22, 2021
Publicly Available Date	Feb 22, 2021
Journal	Gender and Society
Print ISSN	0891-2432
Electronic ISSN	1552-3977
Publisher	SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	35
Issue	6
Pages	940-970
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432211046318

Files

Accepted Journal Article (463 Kb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).