Inequality, Intersectionality, and In/Visibility of Woman in the Australian Sports Broadcast Technology Industry

Although sport is a salient part of Australian culture and way of life with women in sports currently at the zenith of popularity and visibility “on” screen, the experiences of women working in sports broadcast technology roles behind the scenes have been overlooked. To fill this gap, this study investigates how women in the sports broadcast technology industry experience and make meaning of gender inequality in the workplace. Employing an intersectional sensibility, we think through the prism of Acker's inequality regimes and the paradox of visibility to reveal how women proactively construct and do gender in the workplace by making themselves invisible and “fitting in” with the men while paradoxically “trying harder” to display excellence and stand out as women, while attempting to resist and subvert inequality regimes. In doing so, we contribute a conceptual framework with applications beyond sports broadcasting technology that could scaffold studies seeking to provide nuanced and microlevel analyses of the lived realities of women in gendered organizations. We further extend and deepen intersectional thinking by exploring how age, as a category of difference, offers possibilities for change in gendered organizations. Empirically, our findings can inform organizational policy and practice. Finally, we introduce sports broadcast technology to the field of gender and organization as an area ripe with research opportunities.