It’s Time to Woman Up!: A Psycho-Social-Cultural Exploration of Women Athletes in Elite Sport

Despite the rise in the number of elite women athletes succeeding in sport, sport continues to be critiqued as a patriarchal space that is infiltrated with hegemonic masculine norms that positions women athletes as inferior to their male counterparts. Recognizing this disparity and the potential for more women’s sporting success after the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, coaches, and sport practitioners from across Great British sports sought a rigorous program of research to explore how they could optimize the performance potential of their women athletes. While this PhD is within the field of sport psychology, informed by this rationale and underpinned by critical feminist psychology, the purpose of this thesis was to provide a rich, nuanced, and contextualized understanding of the psycho-social-cultural experiences of women athletes and their coaches within the Great British elite sport system and therefore draws from sociological theory to interpret the data. Data were collected over 20 months via 300 hours of fieldwork observations and 39 semi-structured interviews with 19 elite women athletes and 10 elite coaches, from across five Olympic and professional sports. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyze the qualitative dataset and findings are presented as realist and confessional tales. Using the concept of hegemony as a theoretical lens to interpret the data, it was identified that macro-level factors (e.g., socio-cultural attitudes around women’s sport inferiority) permeated the sport environments in the ways that women athletes are viewed and treated. At the meso-level, the gendered structures of sport organizations influenced the norms, practices, and interactions that marginalize women athletes within the sport environments. These factors influenced the practices at the micro-level whereby coaches differentiated their practices based on the gender of the athlete, and the women athletes navigated the competing demands of being women in Western culture and elite sport. The findings demonstrate that each level plays a role in actively producing and reproducing the broader power relations between genders within and beyond the sporting environment. ‘Moments of intervention’ are offered to coaches and sport personnel to create more inclusive environments to provide optimal support for women athletes.