In Stockholm there are currently five women, out of a total of 102 employees, working in public sports arenas. In sports arenas men are numerically superior amongst the workers as well as the visitors. These arenas are in many ways male dominated, masculinized environments. In this essay I investigate the reasons behind the uneven distribution, in terms of gender, among sports arena workers. I do this by interviewing seven female sports arena workers (the five current and two former), and by observing their workplaces. Through discourse analysis of their narratives, I seek to use these women’s experiences, as being part of a minority, as a way to render sports arenas more available for a larger public. In the study I have a feminist, post-structural standpoint, and I relate my results to theories on gender and organization as well as research on gender and sports. From a doing gender perspective I focus on how the women that I have interviewed talk about themselves, their workplaces and their choices of profession, as well as how they talk about gender and gender equality.

The aim of this study is to present these women’s perspectives on sports arenas as organizations, and to draw links between these particular workplaces and larger social discursive patterns. Another aim with the study is to problematize the very effort to achieve (numerical) equality between the sexes, and to uncover underlying biases. Except for gender biases I also consider intersections between gender and age, social class and sexuality. One of my main findings is that there are quite specific discourses surrounding this profession, reproducing it as masculine. An equalization of the distribution in terms of gender among the employees is not necessarily the entire solution to the inequality problem. A more qualitative effort is needed, for instance a redistribution of power resources within the organization. In the essay I present a list of concrete proposals on how to diversify the personnel in the future, based on the interviews. The main goal with this work is to destabilize the gender based gap in the Swedish labor market, and to increase the availability to all spheres in society, for everyone, on equal terms.