“It's Not in Sport Media's Interest to Challenge the Norms that it Benefits From”: Gendered Organizational Logics and their Impact on Women in Sport Media

Patil, Swarali ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9634-2301, Hindman, Lauren and Le, Thi My Le (2025) “It's Not in Sport Media's Interest to Challenge the Norms that it Benefits From”: Gendered Organizational Logics and their Impact on Women in Sport Media. Gender, Work & Organization. ISSN 0968-6673

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Abstract

Sport is a gendered environment that legitimizes and celebrates the prioritization of men. Sport media mirrors these inequities, evident through the sustained underrepresentation of women in this space. We sought to identify the gendered organizational logics of sport media organizations and their resulting impact on women’s experiences. We also aimed to understand the role of intersectional factors (i.e. age, race/ethnicity, family status, and socio-economic status) on women’s experiences. Through semi-structured interviews with twenty-three women working in sport media in the United Kingdom and United States of America, we found that gendered organizational logics include demanding work schedules and content production expectations, assumptions about the inferiority of women, and fiscal responsibility justifications. Additionally, findings reveal that women’s work experiences are also impacted by the organizational logics of sport organizations, including gatekeeping access and workspace design and working conditions. The logics of sport media and sport organizations intersect and result in women navigating a gendered workspace through managing their appearance, grappling with lack of work-life balance, the need for privilege for career sustainability, questioning their belonging, and working through imposter syndrome. Socio-demographic factors provide insight to the racialized and classed experiences of women working in sport media. Study findings have implications for sport media and other types of organizations, including the impact of non-employing organizations’ practices on workplace gender inequity.