Paper Presentation V:
Problems and Challenges in Women’s Football
Saturday, April 10, 14.15–16.15

Inger Eliasson
Department of Education, Umeå University, Sweden

This paper examines the process of socialisation in girls and boys football teams in relation to the importance of gender in children’s football. In focal point are girls’ and boys’ experiences of the interaction among children in Swedish football teams. This paper is based on a data gathered from ethnographical fieldwork over two years through participant observations of the daily life of football (n=60), and through interviews with 11 years old girls (n=23) and boys (n=15), their coaches (n=7) and some of their parents (n=8) in two sex-segregated football teams. The study is inspired by Connell’s (2002) gender theory and Thorn’s (1993) ethnographic gender studies, which both provide support for the view that gender is a social construction process in which children actively participate. The result shows how boys relate to a dominant masculinity and how girls relate to a male standard that exists in children's football. The girls are aware that their behaviour is not appreciated or valued as highly as that of the boys, even if their behaviour is quite similar in many ways. Boys give expression of a dominant masculinity based on being tough and better than girls in sport. One boy embodies a rejection of the dominant masculinity as the norm in the boys’ team by saying that "the other boys want to be tough," when he talks about what it is like in the boys’ team. The boy is an example of subordinate masculinity, which means that he is at risk of being marginalized in the social interaction within the team. Overall this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationships between girls and boys and how child football contributes to a gendered socialisation in sport.