Counting women: Indicator culture and gender inclusion in sports leadership

Indicators as technologies of knowledge in sports governance

Sports organisations’ various forms of measurement reflect broader trends across many areas of policy and governance with novel approaches to governance and regulation arising around the turn of the 21st century. Merry (2016: 9–10) argues that one result of such developments is the emergence of indicator culture, which

includes a body of technocratic expertise that places a high value on numerical data as a form of knowledge and as a basis for decision making. Its characteristics are trust in technical rationality, in the legibility of the social world through measurements and statistics, and in the capacity of numbers to render different social worlds commensurable.

Reflecting this pattern, Australian sporting organisations increasingly promote the use of data and evidence-informed approaches within their governance strategies (e.g. Australian Sports Commission, 2022). Building on Merry's observations, we seek to shed light on the kinds of data valued in sports gender equity agendas, demonstrating how the counting of women has become a key indicator through which organisational improvement is tracked.

As scholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have long observed in relation to other fields, the techniques through which knowledge is produced are not neutral. These claims of neutrality are themselves enactments of power. Merry (2016) pays critical attention to how data collection and analysis coalesce in the development of indicators that transform heterogeneous social phenomena into comparable numerical information. The quantification that these indicators represent are not simply records of a pre-existing set of conditions; they, as Merry and Coutin (2014: 2) argue, ‘produce certainties out of ambiguous and contested situations’ to ‘make some things visible and others invisible’. Further, this division contributes to how indicators can become ‘modes of power’ (Merry, 2016: 29). In making this argument about power, Merry links her discussion to Foucault's (1979) claims that power and knowledge are inextricably intertwined, with power as the ability to shape the creation and use of knowledge. Merry's work demonstrates that better-designed indicators alone do not alleviate such tensions. Instead, critical attention must be paid to how the requirement of measurement and the construction of measurement categories operate as forms of power.

In attending to how power and knowledge are entangled, we also look to the feminist STS scholar Haraway (1988: 580) and her observations that scientific rationalities ‘work in the service of hierarchical and positivist orderings of what can count as knowledge’. Though these logics present as universalising objectivity, the knowledge produced by such orderings are still partial perspectives. Given such a partial perspective, Haraway argues for the need to approach and value knowledge as ‘situated’, which is to say it is shaped by, and shapes, the context and location of its production. Harding (2015) makes a similar point, suggesting that querying what types of knowledge are seen as valuable provides insight into the power dynamics that underpin knowledge and its impact. Both Harding and Haraway contend that such examination, and the power dynamics embedded in this, are important feminist projects.

In raising this issue of power, we note our analysis is not a broad account of how gendered power relations operate in sport. Drawing on Haraway (1988) and Harding's (2015) observations, we closely examine and concentrate on how our interviews and analysis of quantified targets in sports governance documents reveal the partial nature of the account offered by indicators used. Due to their closeness to what indicators seek to measure – progress towards gender inclusion – our participants’ perspectives provide an understanding of the power of indicators and what they can and cannot capture. Elaborating on their insights, we seek to illuminate how such indicators shape this issue, and how this is influenced by existing gendered power relations in sport. In doing so, this analysis builds on feminist scholarship that argues convincingly that sport is riddled with such relations (Aitchison, 2005; Jeanes et al., 2021; Messner, 2002): from the regulation of women's bodies (Henne and Pape, 2018) to the de-valuing of women's sports through unequal pay (Morgan, 2021) and sexual harassment of women athletes (Fasting et al., 2007). We demonstrate that an organisational desire to track progress on gender inclusion via quantification can become a performative measurement that operates to maintain, rather than overturn, this gendered status quo.

Indicators in Australian government sports bodies

The AIS leads Australia's high-performance sport system and is operated by the ASC, a government agency. Through the AIS, the ASC delivers funding to the country's network of federated national sports organisations (NSOs) and provides support for high-performance athletes, particularly those in Olympic sports. As a statutory authority, the ASC is also responsible for providing leadership and holding the NSOs accountable for their performance, their policies and processes and their appropriate spending of government funding. One of the ways it does this is through the establishment of Sport Governance Principles (ASC, 2020) and the development of strategies that set out the vision for Australian sports. This includes the 2032+ High Performance Strategy (2022), with its title referencing Brisbane as the host of the 2032 Olympic Games. The strategy notes that the build-up to these Olympic Games provides a ‘generational opportunity’ for Australian sporting success and is ‘an incredible opportunity to unite, inspire, and build Australia through High Performance Sport’ (ASC, 2020: 5).

The High Performance Strategy also sets out several aims and quantifiable measures related to the practices and capabilities of NSOs, including a goal related to gender inclusion: ‘Establish benchmark diversity and belonging data across a range of areas (e.g., gender, cultural background, skillset, experience, age)’ (2022: 17). This is measured by the number of NSOs meeting diversity targets for their Board, CEO, Executive, High Performance and Head Coaching positions as well as metrics for staff and athlete inclusion and belonging. The targets are not enumerated in the strategy, though the head of the ASC, Kieren Perkins, has stated a goal of gender parity in high performance coaching by the 2032 Olympics (Decent, 2022). The Sport Governance Principles (ASC, 2020: 13) include a recommendation for NSO Boards to ensure ‘that no gender accounts for more than 60 percent or less than 40 percent of the total number of directors’. ¹

Such diversity targets point to how counting women as an indicator of gender inclusion is a dominant paradigm within Australian sports governance. This paradigm is closely tied to the overarching regulation of employers and is a legacy of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 (Cth), which introduced public reporting requirements for employers (with over 100 employees) on employee gender (Smith and Hayes, 2015). The ASC, along with larger NSOs, are required by law to collect and report on employee gender; repurposing this information as an indicator of improvement of gender inclusion requires no additional data collection and analysis for these organisations beyond existing legal obligations.

In considering the ASC's deployment of counting women, we suggest this paradigm obscures a more complex process of categorisation that collapses differences into the axis of gender. In the first instance, it reduces gender to a binary construct. ² Further, it veils other forms of difference within the workplace. While the ASC admittedly seeks to count across other areas such as ‘cultural background, skillset, experience, age’ (ASC, 2022: 17), it is not clear that there is any intention to view these counting practices through an intersectional lens. Intersectionality has been widely taken up as a framework for understanding interrelated forms of social difference that shape experiences of discrimination, marginalisation and oppression, as they cross axes that span, for example, age, class, disability, gender, race and sexuality (Calasanti and King, 2015; Crenshaw, 1989; Erevelles and Minear, 2010; Harris and Bartlow, 2015). Yet, as McBride et al. (2015) note, the engagement with difference is often limited to dynamics in workplaces that attend only to the categories of men and women. Intersectionality offers a reminder that attempts to generalise notions of either men's or women's experiences negate diversity within such social categories of difference.

Further, inattention to intersectionality means diversity itself has collapsed, with women largely coming to represent diversity. For example, the ASC's strategy notes that its ‘priority diversity areas’ are ‘Women, [and] Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’ (2022: 35). Treating women as a universal category for diversity reduces the ability to understand that not all women (nor Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) have the same experiences. Individuals who occupy intersectional spaces – that is, two or more overlapping axes of oppression – have experiences that are likely quite different to those occupying one of the categories. This is rendered invisible in the context of Australian sport, with the paradigm of counting women and inattention to intersectionality obscuring how Australian sports organisations are led by people who are overwhelmingly white and able-bodied. Indicator culture thus presents the category of women homogenously, which Harding (2015) would describe as an epistemological manoeuvre that promises universality while obscuring important forms of difference. The power given to quantification veils these differences, even as the people within the organisation are aware of them. As one interviewee, Emily, who worked at the ASC, stated, ‘We have no First Nations coaches. We have a very white, middle-income industry’.

Queerness is likewise a category of difference rendered absent when focusing on gender as the signifier of diversity. As Knoppers et al. (2022) have noted, an uncritical performance of diversity by sports organisations obscures how sports themselves reproduce deeply heteronormative gender binaries. This heteronormativity in sport leadership also becomes visible when attention is paid to the types of roles that women occupy, with women often occupying administrative and support positions rather than sports operations roles. One of our participants, Alanna, described an NSO she had worked at where 40% of the staff were women, something that was viewed within the organisation as an achievement. Yet Alanna was critical, saying

You need to dig deeper into your data, and you need to cut your data in two or three ways to start to see where the patterns are. And women weren't in those traditionally male spaces like high-performance sport for instance, but they were all in marketing and they're in comms [communications], HR [Human Resources].

These comments gesture to the need to treat basic numerical data in ways that provide more insight; Alanna suggested consideration of ‘the different diverse experiences and identities, the role, [and] the role level’ within the organisation was needed. The paradigm of counting women, with its focus on the number and percentage of women in sports leadership, rarely does this. Alanna illustrates a lack of attention to what kinds of roles in sports organisations women occupy and how these roles are gendered. Her observation reflects scholarly commentary regarding how organisational structures are themselves deeply gendered (Acker, 1990). In relation to sport, Piggott and Matthews (2020) capture these dynamics as ‘vertical gender segregation’ in English sports organisations where lower-level roles are dominated by women, and high-level roles are primarily held by men. Alanna's comment also draws attention to how gender relations emerge in the type of role, not only the level of the role. To elaborate, we turn next to the example of the AFL where the types of roles held by men and women remain highly gendered, even when women hold senior organisational positions.

Counting women in Australian professional sport

The AFL is one of the country's most popular and profitable sports. It launched a women's elite competition, the AFLW, in 2017. As part of its public commitment towards women's inclusion, the AFL has produced several action plans, including the Women's Football Vision (AFL, 2021) for its women's competition and the Workforce Gender Equity Plan (AFL, 2022) for its employees. While both outline various goals and actions, the only measurable target associated with its organisational leadership is a ‘40/40/20 vision’, referring to 40% women, 40% men and 20% of any gender ‘in every part of our industry’ (AFL, 2022: 22). The centrality of this vision is a clear demonstration of the counting women paradigm as the primary mode through which the AFL is measuring progress towards gender inclusion.

A limitation of this approach is its focus on counting women in aggregate and thus failing to attend to gendered dynamics at play within different workplace roles. This privileging of numbers can also become internalised within sports organisations. To illustrate, one AFL-affiliated participant, Mary, commented on gender equity across the AFLW, presenting its gender equity positively:

We're pretty good. So, we’ve got a number of really senior women who hold the head of women's football role [in clubs]. We’ve got four female senior coaches of 18. We want that number to be nine as quickly as possible, 50/50 or more, I should say. We have a really good cohort of assistant coaches, and most clubs have more than two [women] in their line or development coach ranks. Two of about six, by the way, not a group of 10 or 12 or larger. Where we see really, really good numbers are we've got all female health care teams at some clubs.

Mary's comments were presented as an example of progress, even as they revealed similar gendered tensions in employee roles to those raised by Alanna in the previous section. She noted this tension in relation to the differential numbers in senior coaches, assistant coaches and health care team roles, yet subscribed to the AFL's counting women paradigm by focussing on the aggregate as ‘really good progression’. Another interviewee, Sam, also AFL-affiliated, was more despairing: ‘We’re talking about equity in the football club. Why does it just have to be limited to events or your personal assistants or the dietitian? Why does it have to be that?’

Aggregating the gender of employees to report positively on women's presence in sports can lead to overlooking how specific types of roles, like those noted by Sam, are disproportionately filled. While some tracking of gender composition, such as reporting under the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012, breaks down gender by employee level within the organisations (e.g. executive, management, non-management, etc.), we found no indicator that tracked how sports organisations account for the different roles that might exist even within the same level. In short, ‘executive’ and ‘management’ become categories of leadership that subsume distinct positions and forms of work that are gendered. Similarly to the collapsing of diversity into a universal category of women noted above, this collapses the gendering of the type of work performed. This gendering replicates trends acknowledged within employment literature where specific fields – most notably those involving care work, human resources, and marketing – are feminised and typically dominated by women (Froehlich et al., 2020). Even in the AFLW specifically, which observes a Pride round and has several publicly out players, such heteronormativity remains a powerful force. As Knoppers et al. (2022: 616) have argued, organisational cultures in sports can be so pervasive that even queer players and staff often ‘engage in behaviour or in performativity that conforms to dominant ways of doing and constructing gender’. Here, an organisational celebration of queerness does not extend to consideration or challenging of its deeply heteronormative organisational structure, in part because indicator culture contributes to its concealment.

Within the central AFL organisation, the differentiation in gendered roles is clear at the highest levels. The AFL can state that four of its eight executive general managers, or 50%, are women; meeting its 40/40/20 vision. At the time of writing, though, the executive general manager positions held by women are in ‘Customer and Commercial’, ‘Inclusion and Social Policy’ and ‘People and Culture’. A woman holds only one operational executive role, that of the ‘Football’ general manager (AFL, 2024). The different roles again reflect a deeply gendered division of labour. The way the AFL currently evaluates gender inclusion, through its 40/40/20 vision, does nothing to engage with the underlying gendering of these positions. The power of quantification lies in these seemingly objective measures remaining valued, even as they provide a limited understanding. The counting women paradigm, in aggregate and without attention to gendered dynamics or important forms of difference, not only masks power dynamics, but also forecloses on a broader exploration and recognition of knowledge about gendered inequities. Without such knowledge, acting to address these is made more difficult.

Metrics championed by corporate coalitions for change in sport

Our final case study is the Champions of Change Coalition (CCC), a non-governmental organisation that has created a range of measures of ‘gender equality’. It tracks its members’ progress against them, producing reports every 2 years against 26 measures. Its members include six AFL clubs and several NSOs, and Football Australia and Cricket Australia, two of the country's other biggest sports. CCC was originally founded as Male Champions of Change in 2010 by the then Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick. The original name points to tensions about the role of men in gender inclusion and the risk of patriarchal and paternalistic approaches. As explained by one interview participant, Naomi, she was initially hostile to the idea; ‘it's men saving us again’. After this first response, she clarified how ‘it is about acknowledging the fact that men hold power, and if the system is going to change, part of what has to change, people in power need to be responsible for changing the system’. Given that men continue to hold most leadership positions in sports, approaches to gender inclusion that sidelines men are seemingly counterproductive. While the CCC group came from these origins, its current members and contributors include both women and men.

Initially focused on corporate businesses, CCC has expanded to include a sports-industry-specific group, which has developed its 26 measures with assistance from the multi-national consulting firm McKinsey & Company (CCC, 2022). Given our focus on leadership, we concentrate on the leadership-specific measures. Here, the CCC replicates those used by the government in tracking workforce gender composition, and, in the paradigm of counting women, asking members to report the percentage of women in leadership, including in coaching. These percentages are broken down in the report by level (i.e. board executive management, senior management, non-managers, etc.). This pattern reflects how indicator culture draws on expertise from other sectors, here deploying corporate programs of gender equality in sports governance, which Banu-Lawrence et al. (2020) also observed. This deployment of corporatised expert knowledge into sport helps to reinscribe the counting women paradigm as the best way to track gender inclusion.

We argue that in this reinscribing of existing measures, the CCC, despite their ostensible goal of change, performs a regulatory ‘check’ in lieu of actually incentivising this change. Not only does this replicate the issues highlighted in the previous two cases but by adopting nearly the same forms of measurement as the ASC and the government, it also incorporates seemingly redundant accountability. One of our participants, Naomi, queried its value, characterising gender inclusion as:

the it thing to do. So, every state and territory has a gender program. Everyone has a marketing campaign. It's all slightly different. We've got [the CCC] now, which is an awesome program, but it's trying to do things that the AIS is trying to do.

Naomi notes that despite increasing investment in women in sports leadership, the lack of cohesion in measuring the impact of investment has potentially squandered valuable resources and hampered efforts rather than helping them. Relatedly, because the CCC is not a governmental organisation, it relies on members to self-report and has no power to verify the accuracy of reporting. Multiple interview participants expressed scepticism about the overarchingly positive results of the CCC report with one stating, ‘that [it] is self-assessed, particularly some sports, and I think are pretty generous in a self-assessment’. The picture of progress towards gender equality is presented positively by the CCC and its member organisations. Despite this, the CCC's practices arguably operate primarily as a form of brand protection through which sports organisations can demonstrate their ‘commitment’ and claim to be making progress.

An interrogation of the only additional measure beyond the counting women paradigm used by the CCC illustrates this observation: the percentage of ‘women employees and/or participants that report an inclusive experience in the organisation’ (CCC, 2022: 8). This kind of information is a vital aspect of tracking gender inclusion in that it provides insight into employee feelings and gendered workplace dynamics. As Merry argues, if quantitative measures are not ‘closely connected to more qualitative forms of knowledge, it leads to oversimplification, homogenisation, and the neglect of the surrounding social structure’ (2016: 1). As an indicator that requires organisations to collect qualitative information about employee experiences, this could protect against oversimplification and provide additional context. Yet the most recent CCC report demonstrates that only seven out of its 16 member organisations collect this (CCC, 2022: 12). We suggest this points towards either an intentional disinterest, a lack of awareness of its importance or missing the resourcing to capture such data, let alone analyse and use it effectively.

Understanding, as opposed to just measuring, the experiences of women in sports leadership is a crucial aspect of gender inclusion. The lack of attention paid to the experiences of women in sports leadership contributes to how the counting women paradigm narrows what can be known about the problem of women in sports leadership. One interviewee, Julia, spoke to the prevalence of organisational strategies focused on increasing training opportunities for women in sports leadership:

the default is to assume that women and girls don't have the skills, don't have the capabilities. But for the most part women have more degrees, are more qualified, more frequently already have the existing skillsets than the same men that are sitting in those positions … So, all we do is we keep trying to find the reason to blame women for not being in those roles instead of saying, ‘Hey, what is it about the environment that keeps them away from those roles?’ I mean, the funniest analogy that more than one person will give is you don't blame a flower for not growing. You figure out what's wrong with the soil.

By largely failing to collect data about workplace experiences, CCC members do not attend to the social structure, or the ‘soil’ to draw on Julia's analogy, that shapes women'sability to be successful in leadership. This is also part of how indicator culture comes to frame the problem it claims to measure: it prioritises the counting of women over other ways of knowing, which could, for example, engage qualitatively with their experiences. Further, in neglecting this social structure, it also points to how the ability to shape what gets counted can operate as a form of power, as we turn to next.