Investigating the cascading effects of board gender quotas: an event system theory perspective

Jordan T. Bakhsh, Katherine Raw, Eleanor Faulkner, Pamm Phillips and Katie Rowe

Sport Management Review, 2025, vol. 28, issue 5, 903-929

Abstract: Sport organisations are increasingly adopting gender-focused initiatives to enhance their representation of women in leadership positions. However, while existing research has demonstrated several benefits for targeted organisations, we have little appreciation for how these effects move beyond targeted organisations. Thus, we adopt an event system theory perspective to investigate the cascading effects of a state-level gender-focused initiative on community sport clubs. We conduct interviews with 14 state sporting association and 111 community sport club leaders, regarding the Balance the Board policy – a state-level gender-focused initiative aimed to enhance the representation of women on state boards. Guided by an interpretative-constructivist lens and inductive approach, we identified the various ways in which the gender-focused initiative influenced community sport clubs’ behaviours, shaped their organisational features, and triggered subsequent events, like the implementation of club committee gender quotas and electing women club presidents. Through our data-to-theory process, we unpack these findings further by theorising desired, inspired, and defensive organising in a process model. In doing so, our study advances knowledge on how gender-focused initiatives affect sport organisations in three novel ways. First, we uncover the mechanisms that underpin how community sport clubs enhance women’s leadership representation and the positive outcomes it creates. Second, our findings counter existing research that claims gender-focused initiatives are limited to gender-based outcomes, by demonstrating how they can enhance diverse representation. Finally, we reveal a key sequence of effects that illustrates the overwhelming anxiety some clubs face and the deflecting, diffusing, and isolating negative outcomes it perpetuates.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/14413523.2025.2520639

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