Standards and separatism: the discursive construction of gender in English soccer coach education

Affirmative action is a problematic, but common, organizational approach to redressing gender discrimination as it fails to address discourses underlying organizational definitions and practices in highly masculinized sites like English football. Unstructured interviews with 27 key personnel and participants in coach education in the north of England within a regional “division” of the organization regulating English football (“The FA”) were conducted to explore the gendered construction and enactment of football and coaching, and the framing of women-only (separatist) coaching courses. Critical discourse analysis identified the deployment of discourses concerning the undermining of standards and the privileging of women as strategies used to neutralize the significance of gender and previous gender discrimination, while re/producing the centrality of masculinity for key definitions and identities

‘I don't think I can catch it’: women, confidence and responsibility in football coach education

Whilst women’s participation in sport continues to increase, their presence remains ideologically challenging given the significance of sport for the construction of gendered identities. As a hegmonically masculine institution, leadership roles across sport remain male-dominated and the entry of women into positions of authority (such as coaching) routinely contested. But in powerful male-typed sports, like football, women’s participation remains particularly challenging. Consequently, constructions of gender inequity in coaching were explored at a regional division of the English Football Association through unstructured interviews and coaching course observation. Using critical discourse analysis we identified the consistent re/production of women as unconfident in their own skills and abilities, and the framing of women themselves as responsible for the gendered inequities in football coaching. Women were thereby strategically positioned as deservedly on the periphery of the football category,whilst the organization was positioned as progressive and liberal

Football, gender and sexism: The ugly side of the world's most beautiful game.

The last 10-15 years have seen substantive claims of an apparent shift in the institutional support for women’s football by the sport’s governing bodies, a shift that is being somewhat echoed in more recent commitments from some major television broadcasters of the sport. However, while the women’s game has seen increasing audiences and more media attention, research suggests that a deeply embedded antipathy to it continues to permeate throughout the sport. In this chapter, we discuss some of the major factors and practices that serve to maintain the traditional gendered order of football (aka soccer), how these connect to football as a powerful and global ideological site, and the extent to which a shift in gendered representation was evident in the British television coverage of the 2017 Women’s Euros