From Oversight to Autonomy

Abstract

Expectations of women’s lower competence to men inform divisions of labor and authority in sport organizations. While recent research has focused on overt challenge to gendered expectations, few studies examine how organizational gender relations change without direct acknowledgment of gender and inequality. I rely on participant observation and interview data collected with the Momentum, one U.S. women’s professional soccer team, to examine how practices of paternalistic oversight shifted to allow greater autonomy for women. Unexpectedly low home game attendance initiated group sensemaking around the effectiveness of marketing practices. One group, comprised primarily of women, embraced grassroots marketing, while a second group, comprised entirely of men, felt this strategy was ineffective. Sensemaking took place in context of a male dominance that gave men the ability to marginalize women’s perspectives despite women’s positional authority. Change occurred when several men left what they felt to be a struggling organization, with the altered gender composition of staff enabling women’s greater control over their work. I discuss the implications of this example of change for future research on gender in sport organizations.