Gendering Fields of International Sports Governance: Implications for Women in Leadership

How can the governance of international sport be conceptualised as gendered, particularly when it comes to the place of women in leadership? To date, sociologists of gender and sport have sought to answer this question by focusing on dynamics of difference-making and hierarchy within a single organisation (e.g., the International Olympic Committee). We adopt a different approach: we consider how the actions of individual sports organisations are shaped the broader field of sports governance within which they are nested. We investigate the case of the International Cycling Union (UCI), the peak global governing body for the sport of cycling, which has made slow progress on gender equality both on the field, particularly in the blue riband discipline of road cycling, and off it (in 2019, only 11% of the UCI’s executive board were women). The UCI is an interesting sports governing body because of how it straddles two spaces of elite sports participation: the Olympic Movement, where gender inequality has become a priority cause including in relation to leadership; and professional road cycling, as exemplified by the Tour de France (TdF), which constitutes its own universe of actors and remains highly gender unequal and relatively uninterested in change. While the UCI can influence certain aspects of both the Olympic and professional sides of the sport, it must also contend with the agendas of other organisational actors in each space. Thus, the actions the organisation takes in relation to gender equality are always contingent upon the current state of play within these fields of governance, which are shaped in turn by masculinity and male dominance. In this paper, we investigate how this complex web of organisational relationships and uneven commitments impacts the gender equality actions of the UCI and particularly the progression of women within international cycling leadership. We rely on 21 semi-structured interviews with key individuals who worked for or held a position within the governance structure of the UCI between the years 2000–2020. We also supplement our analysis with diverse textual materials (media, policies, meeting minutes). All materials were iteratively coded by the two researchers according to a range of emergent themes related to gender difference, governance structure, interests, power, and conflict. Building on Connell’s (1987) concept of gender regimes, and Fligstein and McAdam’s (2015) theory of strategic fields, we show that gender scholars interested in explaining women’s under-representation in leadership positions have much to gain from taking a gendered field approach. Ultimately, we show that the UCI retains the capacity to act in ways that could meaningfully advance women leaders. However, their inconsistent willingness to do so can only be understood by placing it within the broader context of conflictual relations of governance, within which masculinity and men’s power is at stake.