Women representation in the boardroom of Canadian sport governing bodies: structural and financial characteristics of three organizational clusters

ABSTRACT

Research question: This study examines how Canadian sport governing bodies with different levels of women representation on their boards differ in terms of their structural and financial organizational characteristics. Resource dependence theory and critical mass theory guide the study.

Research methods: Data from national, provincial, and territorial sport organizations were collected (n = 270) and entered into cluster analysis. Analyses of variances were used to test for significant differences between clusters.

Results and findings: The cluster analysis yielded three clusters: Organizations with low women representation (1.5 women; share of women: 15.9%), medium women representation (3.9; 44.9%), and high women representation (7.9; 77.8%). The three clusters differed significantly regarding board size, type of organization, organizational age, number of memberships, and logged per capita revenues. High women representation organizations were on average significantly younger and had more memberships, while those with medium women representation generated higher per capita revenues.

Implications: The findings allow formulating more targeted policy initiatives for promoting gender diversity in sport boards.

Research contribution: Rather than only describing women representation in sport boards, the present analysis provides a typology and links the resulting clusters to a number of structural and financial organizational characteristics.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical mass
• gender diversity
• gender equality
• sport organization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to the data containing information regarding the participants’ financial standing that will compromise the privacy of research participants.

Notes

1 The minimum value of zero is possible because some sport organizations functioned as “non-membership” non-profit organizations prior to the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act amendments in 2018.

2 These dollar values result from the following conversion: Cluster 1: e^10.15 = 25,591; Cluster 2: e^10.65 = 42,193; Cluster 3: e^9.46 = 12,835.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Brock University, Canada under a BSIG Seed Grant [no number provided].