Barriers to Gender+ Equity in Youth Baseball


A. Travers, Simon Fraser University; Dominique Falls, Douglas College

Youth baseball remains a masculine domain in Canada and the USA. The overall participation of girls lags far behind that of boys, and adult leadership is also highly gendered and inequitable. The vast majority of on-field volunteer roles related to coaching and player instruction, particularly at the upper, most prestigious levels, are filled by men while women continue to be concentrated in behind-the-scenes organizational and administrative work. Taken-for-granted assumptions that unequal participation and this gendered division of labour reflect ‘natural’ sex differences and individual inclinations are widely shared. While always a numerical minority, the percentage of girls who play youth baseball at the youngest levels is much higher than in subsequent years, when girls either switch to softball or drop out of bat-and-ball sports entirely. Such gendered attrition is an indicator that youth baseball environments are unwelcoming for girls. Some girls and women do continue to play baseball but typically in male-dominated environments where they often contend with isolation and/or hostility. Amateur baseball opportunities beyond youth baseball in Canada and the USA are scarce for girls. Feminist sport studies scholarship has documented the deliberate ways in which men and boys keep girls out of baseball, at first through formal prohibitions and then through cultural environments that are unwelcoming to girls, and by constructing softball as the only appropriate bat-and-ball sport for girls and women. Major League Baseball (MLB), the highest level at which the sport is played in the USA and Canada, continues to be a male-only, sex segregated sport and has yet to have an umpire or Manager (head coach) who is not a man. While youth baseball itself is no longer a formally masculine realm, the invisibility of women who play baseball professionally or on (women-only) national teams, for example, may combine with the all-male character of professional baseball to shape the masculine culture of the sport and the experience of youth players and adult volunteers. Our research examines the ways in which participants, organizations, and leaders “do gender” (West and Zimmerman, 1987) in youth baseball leagues to produce unwelcoming “climates” (Hall and Sandler, 1986) not only for girls and women but for LGBT youth and adults, as well as boys and men who do not relate to masculine gender norms. In this paper we identify the social processes that produce gender inequities in youth baseball environments and propose appropriate strategies for transforming youth baseball to be more gender inclusive. Our project utilized a mixed methods feminist research approach to develop an evidence-based account of everyday social processes that generate gender+ inequity within youth baseball environments. Methods included a survey of youth baseball association executives and coaches in Canada, interviews with both girls who play baseball and girls and young women who have switched to softball in the Greater Vancouver Area, interviews with league executives and coaches in Canada, participant observation by Travers as coach of elite youth baseball teams, and a scoping review of existing research on gender and youth baseball. In this paper, we present findings from our data related to 3 key themes. First, why girls don’t sign up for baseball? Second, why girls and young women who play baseball leave the sport? And third, what is necessary to create a more gender-inclusive experience for girls, young women and gender diverse people of all ages in baseball.

Non-presenting authors:  Nerida Bullock, Simon Fraser University

This paper will be presented at the following session: