Perceptions of the sport leadership labyrinth through the career pathways of intercollegiate women administrators

Abstract

Despite a tremendous increase in sport participation opportunities for women and girls over the previous decades, women are highly underrepresented in leadership roles throughout the sport industry. This underrepresentation has been attributed to a variety of social and cultural barriers faced by women in this male prominent industry, and while these barriers to leadership advancement are well established in literature, individual perceptions of the barriers and obstacles are not well known. Given that men hold the majority of NCAA sport leadership roles, it is critical to evaluate employee perceptions of the barriers to sport leadership advancement for women as networking opportunities, hiring practices, and the effectiveness of organizational diversity initiatives may hang in the balance. As a result, and to fill this gap in the previous literature, the Career Pathways Survey was utilized to gauge employee perceptions of the barriers. Overall, findings revealed that men administrators were less likely to acknowledge the existence of leadership barriers for women employees. Based on these findings, we argue that symbolic organizational structures/policies are falling short of advancing Equal Opportunity Law towards social and cultural change. Implications are discussed along with suggestions on how to improve upon the arguably unsuccessful symbolic structures/policies that sport organizations have implemented to improve their levels of diversity.

Gender Differences in Careers and Publications Within the Sport Management Academy

“…On the other hand, it is possible that this disparity reflects different assessment and promotion practices in sport management departments as well as some of the obstacles and barriers experiences by women in other professions throughout the sport industry (Hancock et al, 2018;Darvin et al, 2021a;Stokowski, et al, 2018;Taylor et al, 2017). These possibilities reflect the concept of "derailment" (Bono et al, 2016), and would suggest departments are engaging in a form of symbolic equality by hiring women into lecturer and assistant professor roles, but not developing infrastructure and adopting policies that would foster and facilitate their progression through the departmental ranks (Darvin et al, 2021b). In this way, departments can present as trying to build equity in their faculty, without providing proper mechanisms and culture for women to advance.…”

“…That being said, there is a great deal of literature examining the experiences of women across the sport industry with much of that research uncovering the influence of stereotyping and discriminatory practices that generate unwelcoming cultures (e.g. Darvin et al, 2021b;Stokowski, et al, 2018;Taylor et al, 2017). Specifically, according to Darvin et al, (2021b), there are processes of symbolic equality throughout sport industry spaces, suggesting that organizations within this arena are engaging in practices that appear to promote equality, but in reality are merely there to represent the façade of impactful initiatives (i.e.…”

“…Darvin et al, 2021b;Stokowski, et al, 2018;Taylor et al, 2017). Specifically, according to Darvin et al, (2021b), there are processes of symbolic equality throughout sport industry spaces, suggesting that organizations within this arena are engaging in practices that appear to promote equality, but in reality are merely there to represent the façade of impactful initiatives (i.e. window dressing).…”

“…These ineffective programming and procedural initiatives have minimal impact on overall equitable representation in male-prominent spaces and do little to combat the myriad of barriers and obstacles minority employees may experience (Darvin et al, 2021b).…”