Gender differences in the authorship of sport management research

It has been suggested that women in academia operate in a ‘chilly climate’. A chilly climate is characterised by a range of behaviours from overt sexual harassment on the one hand to the subtle and unconscious forms of sexism that impact upon daily life, workload distributions, student evaluations, and promotion and hiring decisions (Prentice, 2000). The purpose of this research is to identify gender differences in the authorship of sport management research. The sport management field provides excellent opportunities to search for gender differences because sport is a gendered institution. The concern is that there may be significant aggregate discrimination because universities, sport and the management of both are significantly shaped by male-dominated values. A content analysis was conducted on four of the leading sport management journals - Sport Management Review (SMR), Journal of Sport Management (JSM), European Sport Management Quarterly (ESMQ), and the European Journal for Sport Management (EJSM). The results indicate that males dominate sport management research and publications – 68% of authors in these journals were male. Fifty-sex percent of the articles were authored without a female author involved compared to only 22% of the articles that were published without a male being credited with being an author. The Journal of Sport Management had the highest proportion of female-author involvement. Female authors were involved in 28% of the articles published and accounted for 39% of al authors listed. Of the twenty-one gender-themed articles identified in JSM, eighteen were female authored whilst the remaining three had mixed-gender authorship. No European-based or Australasian-based female scholars have published gender-themed research in any of the four journals reviewed. These results have obvious implications for women in terms of career advancement but also suggest a problem for the profession as the male domination may also reflect a bias in the research direction and methodologies employed.