Gender asymmetries in golf participation: tradition or discrimination?

Reis, Helena

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/3460

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Authors

Reis, Helena

Advisor(s)

Correia, Antónia

Abstract(s)

The present thesis is about leisure and sports, more precisely about the low women’s participation in golf. Since for centuries, golf has been ascribed as a men’s game, the idea is to examine how and to what extent gender discrimination has been tacitly accepted, avoided or overcome by women, thus the thesis focuses on gender issues and leisure paradigms. Having begun by understanding the facilitators and constraints that have influenced female participation in golf along the centuries, through a qualitative research, where depicting amateurs and champions/professionals’ participation, this thesis ends with an overview of the strategies women use to cope with the discrimination that still persists in the game. The three dimension of factors paradigm (Crawford and Godbey, 1987; Crawford, Jackson and Godbey, 1991; Godbey, Crawford and Shen, 2010), acting as constraints (Jackson, 1997, 2005) and/or facilitators (Raymore, 2002) to participation decisions was introduced on leisure sciences, stressing the relation between women’s life contexts and the strategies they adopt in order to succeed in a men’s world (McGinnis, Gentry and McQuillan, 2009), being this a major contribution to the body of knowledge in gender issues. Hence, this thesis relies both in social sciences and consumer behaviour, observing a gender perspective. Results suggest that gender inequities in golf, more than discrimination are a consequence of a strong tradition.