The gendered organization of men's professional sport

Globally, women are underrepresented in the sport workforce. Specifically, in men’s professional sport organizations where much of the commercialization, revenue, and wealth lies, women face barriers to their inclusion and mobility. In this chapter, we focus our attention on the business offices of two such organizations in an examination of how they are “gendered”; that is, how ideas and norms about gender are embedded into organizational structures and social processes in ways that create and reproduce inequalities. Drawing from an ethnographic study, our findings demonstrate the ways that the business offices of the teams are hierarchically, departmentally, and spatially organized around divisions along gender lines, contributing to a lack of women in leadership roles and positions of greater organizational value. These divisions perpetuate gender inequity in the workplace, disadvantaging women even in sport organizations with more gender-balanced staffs.