Counting Women: Indicator Culture and Gender Inclusion in Sports Leadership

Despite the increasing visibility of women’s sports in Australia, women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions within sports organisations. Many sporting organisations have responded by developing strategies to improve the gender balance of their leadership, often focusing on quantifying the number of women in leadership roles. We examine this ‘counting women’ paradigm as an example of what anthropologist Sally Engle Merry has described as ‘indicator culture’, arguing that this paradigm constrains what can be known about gendered inequities and thus how they are addressed. This paradigm, with its emphasis on the number of individual women and ratios of men to women, extracts women as though they do not exist within highly gendered workplaces. Drawing on three case studies, we illustrate three thematic shortcomings that emerge from this approach, which fails to meaningfully attend to intersectionality; capture the gendered dynamics of the roles occupied by women in sports leadership; and document the experiences of women in sports organisations. We discuss how the counting women paradigm contributes to forms of ‘non-knowledge’ about women in sports organisations, flattening the ability to understand and address barriers to women’s inclusion in sports leadership.