Breaking the Glass Ceiling in Sport Organizations: Institutional, Cultural, and Power-Based Barriers to Women’s Leadership

Abstract

Women remain markedly underrepresented in senior leadership across sport organizations, but the mechanisms sustaining this pattern are often treated as separate problems rather than as an interacting organizational system. This article examines the barrier side of a doctoral grounded theory study on women’s leadership transformation in Iranian sport organizations. The qualitative phase comprised 24 in-depth semi-structured interviews with women holding managerial or executive experience in sport organizations and academics or experts with relevant sport-management knowledge. Sampling proceeded purposively and through snowball and theoretical sampling until theoretical saturation. Data were analyzed using a Glaserian grounded theory approach with constant comparison, open, selective, and theoretical coding. The full dissertation generated 133 refined initial codes, 43 subcategories, and 15 main categories; the present article focuses exclusively on the seven categories that constituted the mechanisms reproducing the glass ceiling. These were institutional blockage, gendered culture, human-resource inequality, power networks, organizational flattery, informal relationships, and family obligations. The findings show that women’s exclusion is reproduced through the interaction of formal structures and everyday practices: male-dominated decision systems restrict access to authority; gendered beliefs shape judgments of competence; recruitment, evaluation, and succession routines accumulate career disadvantage; informal power networks control information and sponsorship; ingratiation and personal proximity can displace merit; and work-family arrangements reduce access to time-sensitive leadership opportunities. The resulting barrier architecture explains why symbolic appointment or individual competence alone does not dismantle the glass ceiling. Sustainable change requires transparent selection and succession, equitable access to strategic assignments and resources, formalized information flows, accountable decision processes, and work arrangements that do not treat an unencumbered male career pattern as the organizational norm.