Be a sport?: connecting past participation in sport and gender inequality in Australia's largest corporate law firms

Explaining the persistence of gender inequality in large corporate law firms, by focusing on women's domestic roles, has not produced significant change. I consider this puzzle by studying the under-representation of early-career female lawyers in the pipeline that produces partners in a large Australian corporate law firm. A mixed-methods research design, and a theoretical framework developed by appropriating Pierre Bourdieu's theory and analytical tools, are used to investigate how power transfers between fields: from the hegemonically masculine field of sport as a source of knowledge - to the economic domain of a large corporate law firm as a workplace. I take sport to be a central source for developing transferable soft skills for the workplace. Further, I claim that the gendered experience of sport, in Australia, results in different capacities to acquire and practise such skills, better enabling accelerated career trajectories for early-career male lawyers. Neither gender diversity nor social justice will be achieved by encouraging women to participate in sport on male terms. Instead, I conclude there is greater economic and social value to be gained by changing the decision-making practices, and the valuation of social and cultural capital, within large corporate law firms. Specifically, a lazy or convenient decision-making process, that risks confusing talent with visibility, should be replaced.