Incongruence of gender, leadership roles and underrepresentation of women in sport leadership positions

Research has shown that women have gained access in top executive positions of leadership in different sectors of development, yet they still remain rare and underrepresented in the realm of sport. Over the years, sport management scholars have presented a number of explanations emphasizing the factors that impede women’s ascend to top leadership positions and suggest strategies for change, yet the phenomenon still persists. Apparently, giving voices to the women who lived with the experiences and broke the ceiling of oppression in the male dominated environment have somehow been given less emphasis in the context of social science research. As such, the purpose of this study is to apply phenomenological research approach in order to seek an in-depth understanding of the underrepresentation of women in top leadership positions of sport organizations. Such approach specifically constitutes three qualitative methods which are interviews, observations and document analysis of which believed to provide profound and rich data. Subsequently, data will be gathered from a purposive maximum variation sampling of 19 women leaders who are in the top leadership positions of sport organizations in Malaysia. Furthermore, the study proposes a framework working toward the theoretical perspectives of role congruity, homologous reproduction and pipeline problem of which attribution associated to social, organizational and personal factors would be obtained to explain the underrepresentation of women in sport leadership positions.

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