Sport is a highly potent site for the construction of masculine identity and, as the dominant sport in many countries, it is football that is especially linked to masculinity, national and local identities. Consequently, the increasing number of women entering the field of football comprises a direct threat to masculine identity, creating a significant site of gender conflict. Based upon the proposition that identity is constructed and enacted in talk, this article presents an analysis of an `everyday' discursive practice within football: the routine refusal of appeals to the referee. Using recordings of male referees during both men's and women's matches, the discursive function of this routine practice, its gendered deployment in the collaborative construction and non-collaborative undermining of salient identity categorizations, and the deployment of alternative categories is explored.

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. (2008). Standards and separatism: the discursive construction of gender in English soccer coach education. Sex Roles, 58 (1-2), 24-39. Copyright and re-use policy Standards and Separatism in English Football 2 AbstractAffirmative action is a problematic, but common, organizational approach to redressing gender discrimination as it fails to address discourses underlying organizational definitions and practices in highly masculinized sites like English football. Unstructured interviews with 27 key personnel and participants in coach education in the north of England within a regional "division" of the organization regulating English football ("The FA") were conducted to explore the gendered construction and enactment of football and coaching, and the framing of women-only (separatist) coaching courses. Critical discourse analysis identified the deployment of discourses concerning the undermining of standards and the privileging of women as strategies used to neutralize the significance of gender and previous gender discrimination, while re/producing the centrality of masculinity for key definitions and identities.

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Reviewing research on diversity and relational demography in teams and work groups, the authors compare different ways of measuring gender composition and demonstrate that existing practice can be theoretically biased. The authors conclude that within group-level analyses, the proportion of women should be used; whereas within individual-level analyses, the appropriate approach depends on whether a gender-by-gender composition interaction effect is found. The generalizability of this approach to other types of diversity is also discussed.