Leadership Research Summary:
- For decades, the German sports policy mission statement “Sport for All” has been aimed at attracting women to voluntary work in the sports sector. Nevertheless, women are consistently underrepresented in volunteering within sports organizations and especially on boards. One-dimensional gender analyses that exclude other factors like class and ethnicity cannot, however, adequately describe different modes of disadvantage. In order to analyze the unequal access to volunteering and leadership positions in sport, we refer to inequality theory and intersectional approaches, which include different factors of disadvantage. Our study is based on a quantitative population survey on volunteering in Germany with more than 25,000 respondents conducted in 2014 and 2019.
- The study examines factors and interactions that can predict women’s volunteering and leadership in sport. The results show that the proportion of women who volunteer is lower than the proportion of men and that fewer women than men take on leadership positions. The gender differences were not as pronounced in 2019 as they were in 2014. Independent of gender, the likelihood of volunteering increases with higher income, A-levels, no immigration status, marriage and the presence of children in the household. Part-time and marginal employment is more often associated with volunteering among women than among men; however, the likelihood of volunteering decreases more for women than for men when they are not employed at all. Moreover, higher income for women is less likely to be associated with voluntary work than for men while volunteering in other areas has a more positive effect on volunteering in sports for women than for men.
- Independent of gender, the likelihood of holding a leadership position increases with higher income, with marriage, and decreases with immigration background and with the presence of children in the household. Part-time and marginal employment increase the likelihood of having a leadership position to a greater extent for men than for women. In terms of leadership positions men benefit more than women if there are no children in the household. The results suggest that practical and policy efforts should focus more on improving the conditions for women to gain voluntary leadership positions.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- In the context of social inequality, ascribed characteristics such as gender, age and immigration status, as well as acquired characteristics such as education level, employment and income are of central importance for the reproduction of unequal living conditions of women and men. This applies in particular to access to volunteering. The determinants identified for gainful employment and also mechanisms for the (re)production of social inequality also seem to be at work in access to volunteering in sport. Once access to volunteering in sport has been mastered, socio-structural characteristics seem to have less explanatory power than contextual and personality characteristics in predicting leadership positions in sport. But even in the already selective sub-sample of volunteers in sport, indications of classic patterns of hierarchization in the occupation of positions can be found. A high income increases and an immigration background decreases the probability of taking on leadership positions in sport. However, motives, perceived requirements and the source of inspiration, among other factors, also differ according to gender, so that social inequalities can also be reproduced via these features.
- Recent studies point to the relevance of interdependencies between gender and other socio-structural characteristics in explaining unequal access and unequal positions in voluntary work (e.g., Musick and Wilson, 2008; Rameder, 2015). Gender segregation in occupational work is also indirectly reflected in the findings on voluntary engagement. Women work disproportionately part-time. They are also more likely than men to cite family and time-related reasons (e.g., lack of compatibility between family, work and volunteering) for not volunteering. Disordinate interactions are evident in access to volunteering between gender and employment. As expected, part-time and marginal employment is more often associated with volunteering among women than among men (Rameder, 2015). When predicting leadership positions, it is the other way around. Part-time and marginal employment increase the likelihood of having a leadership position to a greater extent for men than for women. Very few men are part-time or marginally employed and presumably, women in part-time and marginal employment are often responsible for unpaid domestic and family work (Destatsis, 2022).
- As a result, women are not only less likely to take up management positions in professional life, but are also more likely to be prevented from expanding their voluntary work by taking on a more time-consuming leadership position. Gender differences as a function of other variables are larger for leadership positions than for volunteering which is partly due to additional predictors for leadership positions and their interactions with gender. Men benefit more than women if there are no children in the household. Women seem to be moving more into leadership positions, if they have the impression that specific training is necessary for voluntary work and that social skills can be acquired through voluntary work. Getting the impetus to do voluntary work from family or friends worsens the odds of occupying a leadership position more for women than for men.