‘Holding a Gun at Our Heads’: The Sports Council's Role in Merger–Takeovers of Women's Sport, 1985–2000

Abstract

In 1993, the Sports Council's new policy document, Women and Sport, recommended that all national governing bodies of sport ‘establish a single governing body’. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, almost all women sports that were administered separately to their male counterparts therefore ‘merged’ with the men's governing body: squash in 1989, football and athletics in 1992, lacrosse and hockey in 1996 and cricket in 1998. In practice, these mergers became ‘takeovers’, whereby female administrators were forced to cede governance of their sports to male-run bodies whose priority and focus remained men's sport. Work has been conducted on the impact of this process on individual sports, while internationally, studies of similar amalgamations between men's and women's sporting organisations have found that such processes increase male control at the expense of female autonomy. However, there has been no study which considers the impact of the Sports Council's policy on the UK sporting landscape as a whole. Via use of oral histories and archival material, this chapter seeks to begin this process, assessing the impact of a government policy of forced integration of women's and men's sport, which still has potent ramifications in sport governance today.

Citation

Nicholson, R. (2022), "‘Holding a Gun at Our Heads’: The Sports Council's Role in Merger–Takeovers of Women's Sport, 1985–2000", Velija, P. and Piggott, L. (Ed.) Gender Equity in UK Sport Leadership and Governance (Emerald Studies in Sport and Gender), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 51-68. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-206-220221004