Racing Toward Equality? Understanding the Gender's Role in Amateur Automobile Racing Participation and Success

• In Event: 483 - Section on Sex and Gender Paper Session. The Politics of Bodies and Embodiment: Gender and Sports (co-sponsored with the Section on Body and Embodiment)

Abstract

This paper attempts to explain why women fare worse than men at a form of organized amateur automobile racing(autocross). Autocross requires relatively little physical strength and endurance and judges both men and women by an identical sets of rules, and yet the participation and success rates of males and females are dramatically different. The unequal success rates are even more perplexing because autocross is a sport where male participants attempt to encourage female participation. This paper explores the role that gender plays in differential success rates that cannot be attributed to overt sexism or physical hindrances. Despite tendencies among racers and non-racers to assign all disadvantage to females’ lack of “aggressiveness”, I argue that a number of mechanisms that disadvantage women in other social realms, such as educational and the workplace settings, also contribute to their relatively low success rate in amateur racing. Data obtained through participant observation and interviews of male and female racers confirm that social factors play a substantial role in disadvantaging female racers. These include a lack of childhood socialization into automobile enthusiasm, entry into the sport far later in life than their male counterparts, lack of both material and informational resources, and the stigmatization of women racers as inferior regardless of their skill level. Furthermore, there is evidence that gender-neutral rules and norms tend to disadvantage female racers disproportionately.

Author

• Jonathan Vaughn, The Ohio State University