The impact of gender quotas in sport management: the case of Spain

Abstract

This article investigates the impact of gender quotas on sport management by analyzing the gender quota established in 2014 in Spain on boards of national sport federations (of at least three women or 33% of board members). Drawing on published and on-line documents and eighty-six interviews of female and male federation board members, I find that the Spanish gender quota increased the proportion of women board members (but not the proportion of women federation presidents). Economic sanctions for non-compliance made the quota effective. The quota had the effect within federations of making gender inequality more visible. Thus, this research concludes that gender quotas have substantial consequences for sport management other than the numerical increment of women managers.

Keywords:

• Quotas
• Spain
• sport
• gender
• management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgments

For invaluable comments on earlier versions, I owe thanks to Rosemary Barberet, Mara Bustelo, Xavier Coller, Marsela Dauti, Juan Fernández, Roberto Garvía, Carmen González, Rodolfo Gutiérrez, Esther Ruiz and anonymous reviewers. This article is dedicated to my son Daniel, the joy and inspiration of my life.

Notes

1 The Sydney Scoreboard is a web-based tool tracking women’s presence in management of national sport organizations in 45 countries from the five continents (Adriaanse 2016, 149).

2 No research of which I am aware examines the effects of quotas on sport management in Costa Rica and France, which are the other two countries with this type of quotas (apart from Norway and Spain).

3 Additionally, Olympic sport is managed by the Spanish Olympic Committee.

4 In this article, all translations from Spanish to English are done by the author.

5 Because of my own errors, I failed to digitally-record four interviews. Since I soon realized that I had not recorded these interviews, I reconstructed them on paper with the help of my notes and my memory the same day of the interview or very soon afterwards.

6 The main governing organ of a NSF is the assembly. It is composed of presidents of regional sport federations and representatives (elected every four years) of athletes, clubs and sport professionals other than athletes such as coaches and referees. The assembly approves the annual budget and its implementation and the annual calendar of sport competitions. The assembly elects the president. Between meetings of the assembly, a ‘delegated commission’ (comisión delegada) is in operation.

7 According to publicly available data, this NSF has not reached parity in decision-making bodies. However, this should not invalidate the importance of this quotation. The purpose of the interviews was to know what were the main challenges identified by board members. Verifying whether these challenges correspond to real facts or not was not the purpose of the interviews.