Men in the sport of sailing used arguments related to aspects of their masculinity such as physical strength to exclude women and some men, according to a University of Queensland study.
For her PhD thesis with the Anthropology and Sociology Department, Dr Louise Bricknell interviewed 45 men and women associated with competitive sailing in Victoria. She also kept extensive diaries of her observations of the sailing culture throughout the five years of the study.
Dr Bricknell has competed in off shore and one design racing, worked in the marine industry both in Australia and the United Kingdom and currently sails a Europe dinghy.
She said that to her knowledge, no sociological studies had previously focused on gender in sailing - the most male-dominated, dual-gender sport at the 1996 Olympic Games (only 21 percent of the participants were female). Men also dominated administration, management and coaching, she said.
The thesis focused on how different males expressed their masculinity, females their femininity, heterosexuality and the relationships between genders in a culture of competitive sailing.
"While the focus was a sailing culture, the framework used to analyse how the men and women in the culture interacted could be useful to studies of gender and gender relations in a number of different contexts - for example, in business, education, government, family, social settings and certainly sport," Dr Bricknell said.
The thesis highlights the complexity of gender relations in dual-gender sports and how these can affect performance levels, activities and participation rates.
For her thesis, Dr Bricknell asked her subjects what they thought about a range of issues. These included females' increased participation in the sport, why many males were reluctant to race offshore with mixed gender crews, whether they felt the culture made itself accessible to different social groups, and fitness.
She brought together social structures (such as gender), social practices (what people did on a daily basis) and subjectivities (their feelings about what they did) using sailing as a backdrop.
"I wanted to produce a piece of research that provided people with a better understanding of the culture around them. In doing this, I discovered that beliefs about what it is to be a man played a crucial role in defining and maintaining sailing as a male-dominated sport, despite increasing levels of female participation," she said.
She said men used arguments about their masculinity such as physical strength to keep women off the boats.
For example, she noted while most males felt fitness was not really the issue in sailing, unless at the elite dinghy or professional big boat levels, they also felt that females did not make as ?good' sailors as males, despite experience, because they weren't ?fit' enough.
"Fitness was defined as strength and it was this definition that was used at different levels to limit, define and in some instances exclude females and some males from participating fully in the sport," she said.
She said another masculine belief that feelings got in the way of performance was also evident in the sailing culture she studied.
"Most males felt that feelings had to be excluded to sail competitively - a notion often harboured by many female sailors too - and if they developed as a result of sexual desire then the object of that desire had to be excluded or carefully policed," she said.
"This not only resulted in exclusionary practices towards females, it also meant men sometimes displayed a lack of care towards their own bodies and feelings. Examples included excessive alcohol consumption, over or under-training, sun exposure, poor diet, under-dressing in the cold, ribaldry, discussing sexual relationships in often derogatory terms and so on."
The thesis was supervised by Anthropology and Sociology Department Associate Professor Jim McKay and senior lecturer Dr Michael Emmison.
Dr Bricknell said she chose to study at the University of Queensland because of Dr McKay's excellent work on gender and sport in Australia and overseas. This, coupled with the University's flexible approach allowing her to stay in Melbourne to complete her study, contributed to the quality of the research and the learning experience, she said.
For more information, contact Dr Bricknell (telephone 03 9646 6759 or email bricknell@rmit.edu.au).
