Research indicates that female athletes have long occupied marginal and sometimes invisible positions in sport settings and mainstream media. The focus of this study is on understanding and analyzing how race, class, gender, and other forms of oppression shape women’s professional sport using as the focal point, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the type of mainstream media coverage it receives. The researcher believes that a better understanding of these varied experiences would add depth and knowledge to research on CSR in sport, women and sport research, as well as allow professional leagues and teams to move forward with a more informed perspective regarding design, delivery, and overall purpose of CSR in women’s professional sport. The purposefully selected sample includes six semi-structured interviews with league and team executives from the Women’s Tennis Association, Ladies Professional Golf, Women’s National Basketball Association, and Women’s Professional Soccer. Additionally, this study includes content analysis of 218 public organizational documents and a content analysis of the New York Times Sports sections. The data was coded and organized according to the research questions. Analysis and interpretation of findings were organized by way of two analytic categories that were based on the study’s conceptual framework: (a) Intersectionality and sport, and (b) How and why women’s professional sport leagues and teams engage in CSR. Ultimately, this study is important because CSR initiatives often serve as a way to connect with the community, bring attention to socially relevant issues, and highlight athletes who serve as positive role models for youth. Race, class, and gender discrimination by the sporting public negatively impacts the level of interest in women’s sport, which, in turn affects the ability of women’s professional sport leagues and teams to effectively engage in CSR. As a result of discriminatory practices, opportunities to conduct meaningful outreach to young women and girls are weakened. Recommendations are offered for future research possibilities. Given that there are multiple factors that affect CSR in women’s professional sport and the type of mainstream media coverage leagues and teams receive, the recommendations generated by this research should be considered for their appropriateness on an individual basis.

Virtually the entire body of scholarly literature on professional sport focuses on athletes themselves, rarely directly considering the impact of sport on the significant others in their lives or the role these significant others play in the career path and decision-making processes of athletes. In recent years, a limited, but growing, body of scholarly literature on athlete’s wives and sport marriages has begun to emerge with respect to American sports. However, little work has been done on the role and experiences of football spouses in the Canadian context. This dissertation focuses on football spouses in the Canadian Football League (CFL). I use an ethnographic approach relying on in-depth interview with football spouses from the CFL to explore how they experience their partners’ football careers, with a focus on their identity construction. I also used participant observation (at training camp and football related events) to gather data and collected and analyzed secondary documents (newspaper articles, blogs, tweets). Working from an interactionist perspective, I offer the empirically grounded concept of a “courtesy identity” to explain how these women confront the challenges of being known through their intimate relationships. I argue that these women are active agents who negotiate how much they are willing to transform themselves to meet the demands of football life. The “football wife” identity is always emerging and changing in response to the messages women receive about being a football wife during their interactions with others (both insiders and outsiders in the social world of the CFL) and as they encounter new situations. I demonstrate this argument by exploring: (a) how these women develop the football wife identity by focusing on their day-to-day private lives; (b) how the spousal subculture helps these women to negotiate the challenges of being a football wife while at the same time creating challenges of its own; and, (c) how football spouses negotiate their husbands’ celebrity status by examining how these women manage their presentation of the football wife identity in public. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis analyses discourses about the roles and barriers to access for women to decision-making positions in Israeli sport organisations. In particular it focuses on the exploration of discourses of masculinity and femininity that underpin the relatively recent construction of Israel society and the institutions of sport within it. It is observed that for the most part, Israeli sport organisations are governed by men and have served the interests of forms of hegemonic masculinity. In order to understand and explore the social construction of these gendered discourses in Israeli sport, two innovative and significant policy initiatives toward gender equity in sport were explored through the perceptions and discourses of key actors. These include the establishment of a Volleyball Academy for Young Talented Girls (VAYTG) and the creation of the National Project for Women and Sport (NPWS). The theoretical framework for this thesis is informed by poststructuralist feminism, which provided an alternative way to understand and analyse voices of the (predominantly female) 'other' and thus to explore the historical contextual construction of current discourses of masculinity within Israeli sport organisations and society as a whole. The process of narrative revisions and production of gendered knowledge revealed how discourses produce and reinforce gender inequities in Israeli society, such as the discourse of militarisation or the unique political affiliation system in the sporting arena which continue to implicitly exclude women (and some men) from gaining access to leadership positions in sport organisations. Within this theoretical frame, Critical Discourse Analysis was employed as a methodological approach to analyse how female and male interviewees, all considered to be 'insiders' within their organisations, explained the process of the construction of gendered roles and barriers. Included in the interview data was also the auto-ethnographical accounts of the author, who was a primary actor in the process of developing policy in the two case study initiatives addressed. Dominant discourses of femininity (such as the discourse of sisterhood and of the processes of mentoring), and of masculinity (and how these promote uniformity) were identified as mechanisms for reproducing the gendered reality of sport leadership in Israel. The implication of a critical theoretical approach is that it should be emancipatory in its ambitions and impact, and the study is intended to contribute to enhancing the understanding of how discourse not only reflects but also creates barriers and opportunities so that the construction of such barriers can be challenged in progressive policy discourses.

Choosing to Run: A History of Athletics and Gender in Kenya, c. 1940s – 1980s explores the history of gender and athletics in Kenya, with focus on the Rift Valley Province, from the onset of late colonial rule in the 1940s through the professionalisation of the sport during the last decades of the twentieth century. The first two empirical chapters provide a history of athletics during the colonial period. The first highlights the continuity of ideas about sport and masculinity that were developed in nineteenth century Britain and were subsequently perpetuated by the men in charge of colonial sport in Kenya. The next chapter considers how pre-colonial divisions of labour and power within Rift Valley communities informed local peoples' cultures of running. The absence of women’s running was not only the result of sexism translated from the British metropole to its Kenyan colony but also of pre-existing divisions of responsibilities of indigenous Kenyan men and women into separate, gendered domains. The second half of the thesis considers the impact of social change within women’s athletics internationally and of marriage, childbirth and education locally on female runners in the Rift Valley during the post-colonial period. Most women abandoned athletics once they reached maturity. Those who sought to do otherwise, as the final chapter argues, found that they could only do so by replicating the prototype of masculine runners that had already been established. Later, after the professionalisation of running allowed women to become wealthy, female patrons took this a step further by providing resources to those in their community in need, setting themselves up as 'Big (Wo)men'. This thesis uses athletics to reveal how gender relations and gender norms have evolved and the benefits and challenges that the sport has brought both to individual Kenyan women and their communities.

Contemporary literature says that women are less competitive than men. In this thesis I find out if this is the case even in an environment of elite Czech distant runners. Statistical and econometric methods applied to the data from the years 2006-2013 reveal significant differences between the sexes across all distances from 1 500 meters to marathon. These are the highest in the longest distances when Czech men run marathons five times faster than Czech women. Furthermore, I show that the gender gap in competitiveness remains constant on the track races, but in the road racing is declining. And because the acceleration among women occurs primarily in the lower ranks of the elite, it is concurrently valid "biological-predisposition" hypothesis, which is based on a constant differences between men and women due to biological differences, and "economic-incentive" hypothesis, according to which the differences is decreasing due to increasing returns of success in the form of the same financial rewards for winning. Completely fastest women act according to the first-mentioned, next best female runners according to the second. Finally, I suggest that growing quantity of women in road races plays substantial role in the women's approaching to men.