Conference Day 3: Gender, Age, Intergenerationality (3B)

Bridging Brains: Exploring Gendered Attitudes and Inequalities in a Mind-Sport

Professor Samantha Punch, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling; Elizabeth Graham; Dr Charlotte McPherson; Dr Miriam Snellgrove, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling

Bridge is enjoyed at multiple levels and in a diversity of environments by tens of millions of players, making it the most popular card game worldwide. Its challenging, complicated nature has seen it be declared a ‘mind-sport’ by many, with Paul Mendelson (2008, p.9) arguing that bridge is ‘as taxing on the brain as a decathlon on the body’. As with most sports and leisure pursuits, bridge’s player base and their performances feature inequalities. Whilst a roughly equal proportion of men and women play bridge, at the top level of the mind-sport male players significantly outperform female players worldwide. Using data from 40 semi-structured interviews, this paper explores the gendered assumptions that exist and are reproduced by elite bridge players. Many of the research participants draw on ideas of male brains being more rational, logical and competitive whereas women’s brains are more emotive, caring and uncompetitive. These gendered stereotypes are used to explain and defend why more women are not playing at elite level. However, those women who do make it to the highest level are described in masculinist terms of success thereby demonstrating the socially constructed nature of elite bridge skill. Arguably then, using gendered brains as a defence for the lack of female representation at the top is a smokescreen that damages women’s opportunities to progress. This article speaks to ongoing, systemic inequalities around gender in (mind) sport.

Bridging the Women-only Game: (Un)Equal Play in a Mindsport

Dr Ashley Rogers, School of Business, Law and Social Sciences, Abertay University; Professor Samantha Punch, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling; Dr Miriam Snellgrove, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling

Gender differences in the sporting world are long-standing and historic. Couched often as biologically given, differences in the uptake, training and playing of sport, from leisure activity to elite Olympian, are riven with discourses, practices and attitudes regarding the different aptitudes of men and women. Recognising the ways these gendered differences operate is contentious and problematic. Within leisure studies, the macro context of inequalities tends to be less frequently examined compared with the personal satisfaction and transformative power of a particular leisure activity and sporting practice. Using the case study of the card game bridge, we explore how gender inequalities within a mind-sport are experienced and reproduced at a structural level and how this directly impacts women’s (in particular) participation. Using email data from 151 participants, we analyse the ways in which segregation in the mind-sport is viewed as both hindering wider take-up of the game and providing women spaces to compete nationally and internationally. Discussions with players, teachers and organisers of club, tournament and international bridge show how the women’s game is riven with both inequality and opportunity. We conclude that in order for women to progress competitively and equally within the mind-sport, greater attention must be paid to the training of coaches and the managing of sexist behaviours at and away from the bridge table. Until such changes are made, women will continue to face pressures to justify their success (and lack thereof) as a personal failing, rather than a structural issue.