Overview of my research project, the research questions, where the work is situated in terms of scholarly literature, and the anticipated methodology.

1. How gender and sexuality intersect
to affect leadership in sport
Danielle Warby
Master of Arts (Research)
Supervised by Adele Pavlidis and Simone Fullagar

2. Background

3. • How does sexuality and gender intersect to affect leadership in a
sport context in Australia?
• Why this, why now?
• Women’s sport revolution
• Visibility of diverse sexualities and identities
• Use the present as a lens to look back on the past and “interrogate
normative gender representations that sustain leadership as a
heroic, masculine site of activity” (Stead and Elliott 2018, p.2)
Overview

4. What strategies are used by queer women
when enacting their own formal or informal
leadership through gender and sexuality in a
sport context in Australia?

5. • How are those strategies employed and why?
• How is the enactment of feminist leadership rendered (in)visible?
• What are the implications for understanding women’s influence on
sport history?
• What can we learn about these leaders’ present and future identities,
about who they are becoming?
Sub questions

6. • Gender + Leadership
• Gender + Leadership + Sport
• Gender + Leadership + Sexuality
• Gender + Leadership + Sexuality + Sport
Literature review

7. • Women (and men) are expected to behave in stereotypical ways that
align with their gender (Lott, 2007)
• Transgressing gender norms can invite hostility (Binns, 2010)
• Normative gender representations sustain leadership as a heroic,
masculine site of activity (Stead and Elliott, 2018)
• Women can never be completely successful at conforming to the
unwritten rules of heroic masculinity (Binns, 2010)
Gender + Leadership

8. • Women in are under-represented in sport to a greater degree
(Sundstrom, Marchant and Symons 2011 in Litchfield 2015)
• There are specific tensions present for women desiring to attain
leadership positions within sport (Adriaanse and Schofield, 2013 and
Adriaanse, 2019)
• Invisible norms in sport marginalise women (Ryan and Dickson,
2018)
Gender + Leadership + Sport

9. • There are specific pressures on leaders who identify as lesbian
(Gedro, 2010)
• Normative expectations undermine LGBT subjects which can
constrain their performance in organisational settings (Riach,
Rumens and Tyler, 2014)
• Leaders and followers find it difficult to ‘make sense’ of LGBT leaders
and leadership (Muhr and Sullivan 2013)
Gender + Leadership + Sexuality

10. • I’ve yet to find any research that examines gender, sexuality and
leadership together in a sport context.
• Different perspective on the ‘problem of leadership’
• More diverse workplaces
• New ideas of leadership
• Help with some of the challenges faced by women in sport
Significance

11. • Feminist poststructural
• Anti-humanism
• Emotion and affect
Participants
• 3 to 5
Methodology Methods
• Feminist oral history
• Autoethnography
• Reflexivity
• Questionnaires
• Document analysis

12. Thank you. Questions?