Women in Male-Dominated Sports: A Case Study of Women’s Futsal in Astana

Abstract

Women’s participation in sports such as futsal is growing globally, and Kazakhstan is not an exception. However, women’s futsal remains an understudied topic in Central Asia. The most notable thing is that female players in Kazakhstan struggle with limited institutional support, cultural marginalization, and a lack of sociological attention. This capstone project addresses this gap by exploring how women futsal players in Astana navigate a male-dominated sport and what their experiences reveal about gender and power in contemporary Kazakhstan. The current study is guided by an integrated theoretical framework that treats patriarchy as an ideology (Hunnicutt, 2009) and understands hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005) and pariah femininity (Schippers, 2007) as its key mechanisms. This framework enables us to analyze how structural, cultural, and individual dimensions of gendered inequality in sport are interconnected. The research employed a qualitative research design by conducting semi-structured interviews with 8 current and former female futsal players from university or regional clubs in Astana. The participants were 18-35 years old with at least two years of experience in professional futsal. The collected data were analyzed through thematic analysis using both deductive and inductive coding, which resulted in four major findings. First, women’s futsal in Astana can be conceptualized as “benevolent neglect,” where the Kazakhstan Football Federation (KFF) officially includes women but does not provide sufficient resources, long-term investment, and cultural recognition, which reflects a patriarchal accommodation...