Gendered Bureaucracies: The Long Road to Inclusion for Women Leaders in International Sports Governance

Women’s participation in elite sport has increased dramatically over the past four decades as a result of explicit national policies promoting equal opportunity in sport, such as Title IX in the United States, and the addition of women’s events and sports to high profile international competitions such as the Olympic Games. Yet just as women’s representation among political leaders has been slow to follow from women’s suffrage, the consolidation of women among the ranks of elite athletes has not been accompanied by a similar shift in the gender balance of sports leadership. In this paper, I present preliminary analysis from a comparative study of the International Olympic and Paralympic Committees, two of the largest sports governing bodies in the world, and attempt to answer the following questions: first, in what ways have trajectories to inclusion differed for women athletes and leaders? Second, what do these accounts reveal about the gendered character of bureaucracies? Drawing on semi-structured interviews, archival data, and policy documents, I explore how seemingly gender-neutral rules, procedures, and standards produce gendered organizational responses to women’s demands for inclusion. But whereas female athletes have been relatively successful in rendering visible the gender of these bureaucratic procedures, the gendered practices and politics of leadership have been more difficult to reveal and hold accountable. I show how decision-making power within these two governing bodies has been continuously shielded from feminist critique, and consider the implications of this contrast between leaders and athletes for feminist politics more broadly. I argue that the concept of gendered bureaucracy offers much to feminist scholars seeking to understand how intersectional inequalities are consolidated over time within organizations and governing institutions as well as when and how ruptures or change are achieved.