The Social Organization of Gender Inequality in the Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF) – an Epistemic Paradox?

The overall aim of my PhD project was to contribute to accelerating progress in gender equality among top leaders in The Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF). To succeed in this, I used institutional ethnography to dig deeper into the social organization of gender inequality in the organization. During my first interviews with some newly appointed female top leaders, I became aware that what these top leaders said, their practices, ideas and expectations of themselves, were hooked into what I conceptualized as a masculine ruling logic. Because men have traditionally been faced with the requirement to do masculinity, characteristics, actions and attitudes we associate with masculinity are often associated with physical men. It is therefore necessary to emphasize that I do not understand masculinity as a characteristic of the individual (the man), but as an objectifying ruling logic that people through coordinated activity maintain and reproduce, regardless of their gender. The framework points to the fact that there are characteristic forms of ruling in the everyday life in NIF, which regulate and give direction to what top leaders do, perceptions of reality, social interaction and ways of thinking, and being. Gender equality is nevertheless thought of as something that is possible to achieve by recruiting more women into top leader positions - which I, in my presentation, will problematise as an epistemic paradox - or an epistemic illusion, which represents an obstacle for all sports organisations who works to be more diverse and social sustainable. The presentation is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, 38 interviews with current and former top leaders (mainly men) in the sports organisation, a large number of observations of meetings and social events and analyses of institutional texts.