The “fast track” as a future strategy for achieving gender equality and democracy in sport organizations

Nowadays sport organizations represent powerful symbolic institutions and thus central arenas in which dominant societal values, norms, and power structures are reflected, celebrated, and contested (e.g. Burstyn, 1999). How sport organizations frame gender therefore plays a crucial role for the advancement of gender equality in the society at large (e.g. Birell & Theberge, 1994; Hovden, 2000). Analyses of media sports narratives (e.g. Whannel, 2007) illustrate the direct or indirect ways in which gender is discussed, and mirrors dominant notions of gender as well as transgressions that reproduce, challenge, and blur dominant understandings.