Women In Sports and Leadership Analysis

Introduction and Background

Women participation in sports filled with major accomplishment after title IX. However, the majority of essays reveal the issue of women discrimination in sport and they are right. Even today women are surrefing with huge gender discrimination in the sports field. Women are regularly positioned as “other” in sports organizations. The existence of women as competitor, coach and administrator is under steady examination.Men and women are spread irregularly around the world. Out of 201 nations, 125 have more women than men.

In contrary, most of the world nations have never had a female leader. Moreover, even when women had the power, they rarely led it for a long time.

Before the 70’s, athletic departments were divided into two sections: men and women. Therefore, women were responsible for the women’s sport department. However, after title IX, they decided to join these two divisions into one. This issue caused women in dropping their jobs to men.Nevertheless the expanded concentration of women in games, there are yet significant complications that should be tended to with respect to Title IX.

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The insufficient usage and authorization of the law, the absence of support offers in expanding women in organization, leadership positions, and the attention on income delivering sports are parts where Title IX misses the mark in guaranteeing all out sexual orientation uniformity; nonetheless, these issues can be countered with an increasingly positive advancement of women in sports.

Three fundamental parts included usage of Title IX through investment, grants, and different advantages.

O'Reilly and Cahn expand on these angles in this manner:

▪ Participation: necessitates that women be given an impartial chance to compete in games as men (not really the indistinguishable games however an equivalent chance to play).

▪ Grants: necessitate that female competitors get athletic grant dollars corresponding to their participation.

▪ Different Benefits: requires equivalent treatment in the arrangement of equipment, planning, travel, access to mentoring, instructing, offices, exposure, enrollment, and support administrations .

Alongside the execution of Title IX in games programs over America, the issue of diminishing number of women leaders must be tended to. Probably the greatest incongruity of Title IX is that if gave chances for women in intercollegiate sports by all accounts expanding, women authority is diminishing as increasingly more control of women projects is given to men.Women in coaching, athletic organization, and different games positions still can't seem to see correspondence in administration positions like girls at school and competitors have found as far as cooperation chances on the field and court.

The Role of Women in Sports Industry Today

While women have made notable progress in leadership in business corporations, little has changed in the sport industry with still far fewer women than men in senior decision-making positions in sports management.The sport market is an expanding industry that hosts more than 49,000 firms and employs over one million people. As such, the sports industry abounds with opportunities for administrative and leadership positions. Despite these opportunities, women remain significantly underrepresented in leadership positions within sport organizations .Research concerning women leadership in sport has tended to focus on the barriers women face, job inequities and perceptions regarding competency. Lack of strong networks, minimal influence of these networks and lack of mentors have been cited as the most prominent barriers women face in moving into sport leadership.

Furthermore, research suggests that women in sport organizations are more likely to be hired into positions with less power, less pay and fewer opportunities for advancement.The involvement by both men and women in leadership can ensure variety and substitute tactics in the management field. Unfortunately, women are stereotypically viewed as less dominant than men in the work place,more specifically in upper level managerial positions. Men are also more likely to occupy the top positions within a hierarchy.

Additionally, men tend to assume leadership positions more easily than women do. Mast ‘s reasoning for this is since women are underrepresented in top managerial positions and other positions that involve hiring new people into leadership positions, this process will only continue. Meaning, since men are in these positions they are more likely to see women as less capable for these positions and therefore not hire them.

Women in general are under-represented in leadership positions, paid less for their work, and marginalized in the workplace especially within the context of sport.When examining the salaries of male and female coaches of university athletics, women coaches of women’s basketball teams are paid more than men who coach those teams. However, when looking at the salaries of men who coach male basketball teams it is almost double of what the coaches of women teams earn. This in effect lowers the earning potential for women considerably since head coaching positions of men’s teams are almost guaranteed for men due to hiring practices along with disproportionate ratio’s shown by the NCAA -National Collegiate Athletic Association 2012 gender report.

Discrimination, both access and treatment discrimination, occur at the organizational level and negatively affect women in leadership positions in sport organizations. Access discrimination operates by excluding members of certain groups from entering the organization, while treatment discrimination occurs when individuals from certain groups receive fewer organizational resources than they would legitimately deserve.

Several scholars have followed Knoppers’ work of applying the concept of homologous reproduction as a framework to explore the obstacles constraining women’s experiences in coaching and leadership positions in sport. Homologous reproduction operates within an organization when those in power maintain their influence by allowing only those who have similar characteristics to gain access to positions of power and influence within the organization.Women have been excluded from the hiring process in sport because of homologous reproduction and denial of access because of the ‘old boys’ network.

Borland and Bruening explained that for African-American women coaching at the assistant level, access discrimination negatively affect their opportunities for head coaching positions in three ways: few minority administrators in a position to make hiring decisions, limited candidate pools for open head coaching positions, and heterosexism. Additional research has found that women are continually denied access to coaching opportunities within men’s sports.Women are also impacted by treatment discrimination in sport as they are denied access to rewards, resources, or opportunities on the job that they legitimately deserve.Gender is carved in all institutional levels such as structural and communication stages. Thus, to recognize how administrative procedures play part of gender inequality within these establishments, it is vital to run through gender within organizations.

Sexism and absence of opportunities have played a serious part in the underrepresentation of women in sports. Women begun breaking taboo that were hunting them for decades. They started to implement themselves in the “man’s” world, and this act resulted an increase in women’s positions that men have been enjoying for a long time. Recently, we have seen a critical achievement in gender equality expansion. Nevertheless, social, political values and beliefs are until now embedded in organizations and cultures so they are difficult to change and disrupt. Hence, women had to battle for many significant things. However, men always had the freedom to be educated, the ability to vote, or to be involved in the military etc. Women were chosen to do conventional jobs such as remaining home or working in a business that its base is customarily female.Sports is one of the battles that women needed to do in order to survive. People were not ready to see a women competing in sports field. They were not accepting the idea that women can participate in similar sports like men. Sports organizations contains so many unit, formed by numerous factors needed to be revised. Instantly, women were observed as divergent. Certain individuals still look at them as a flimsier sex that does not have the capacity to lead or work in this crucial world. In those frameworks, women still face so many complications in proving themselves; they don’t get recruited so easily because men sometimes have controlling complex.

Gender is an influential aspect of the community. It also determine organizations and especially sport organizations. Gender is not only about profiles and natures, it function a relation of control and show important parts in building communication structures and development of sport organizations .In this research we want to stress about ‘‘how constructions of gender are embedded in organizational discourses instead of primarily in structures or the human or social capital of individual women themselves’’.Sport organizations recognize that gender as an organizing principle in sport needs to be considered along with other forms of identity, including race, sexual orientation, class, and ability.

In the Olympics 2012, some of the delegations had more women than men players. If we dig deeper into these groups, we can notice that women coaches and managers are minimal comparing players. It is hard for women to arrive at top positions in sport management. Taking the example of Sarah Leberman , she discovered that in 90 national federations and associations only 10 are female administrators.

Women are experiencing difficulties in changing these stereotyping ideas and authority styles that stop them for being at top management positions in sports. In 2014, the number of women in leadership roles is between 2% and 3.5%. Kies indicated that anyone that is in a position of authority can change and upsurge public transformation. Her research showed that if a woman were in a high managerial position, number of female coaches would increase.When we want to know about the underrepresentation of women in the sport field, we should seek into women that are already in it. For example, when a woman is in a meeting between men coaches, they tend not to address and point interests with her. All their body language discourage this female coach to be between them. These acts will demoralize women from contributing in this male dominated field.

Shaw and Hoeber indicated that senior management and leadership roles were controlled by discourses of masculinity and that employment roles that were less valued in sport organizations were associated with women and discourses of femininity. Women’s barriers to coaching positions were not always the result of organizational or structural constraints, but were evident in the everyday interactions they encountered with men in coaching.Norman examined the experiences of women coaching at an elite level in the U.K. and described how ‘‘female coaches often feel as though they have to prove themselves as effective coaches to men who question or trivialize their presence’’.

The overall effect of the process known as hegemonic masculinity is a gender gap that is maintained by homologous reproduction. Whisenant, Miller and Pedersen, define homologous reproduction as “the phenomenon where the group in power works systematically to reproduce itself” When the dominant group (men) only allows people who hold characteristics similar to them into their circle of influence it produces a closed network to women.This closed network creates a barrier for women known as “good old boys” club, where men continue to hire and promote males over females.

In Acosta and Carpenter’s longitudinal study found that the gender of an institutions athletic director seems to make a difference in the percentage of female coaches. For example, they found that 1 of 5 head coaches of all NCAA men’s and women’s teams is a female, and 1 of 5 athletic directors across NCAA division institutes is a female.Frequently, women arrive at a type of boundary blocking from accomplishing more in their lives, regularly alluded to as a discriminatory constraint, glass wall, or a glass floor. Generally, women have different boundaries and complexities that restrain their capacity to ascend to the top.

According to Pasque and Errington Nicholson, The demands of a balancing family responsibilities, fears surrounding the sexual orientation of the deals and directors and the influence that may exert on their students, and social constructed barriers such as the ‘old boy’s network’ also offer important explanations for the underrepresentation of women leaders in higher education today. Women fail to reach higher levels of leadership due to the historical separations in education by gender. Women continue to feel isolated and unique in position and leadership styles, and as a result are slow to exhibit gender normative leadership characteristics. Literature on this subject also suggests that the success of these leadership programs is dependent of the affirmation of gender normative leadership styles, the normalization of women in athletic leadership roles, and the replacing of value judgments which socialize traditional female leadership traits as inferior to males.