Mobilising gender equality: A discourse analysis of bids to host the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™

Abstract

After an exciting bidding process featuring competing submissions from Brazil, Colombia and Japan, Australia and New Zealand were chosen to co-host the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™. Using feminist discourse analysis to examine the narrative strategies employed by the bidding nations, this article demonstrates that bidding nations discursively mobilised themes of gender equality to position their bids favourably. They did so by asserting themselves as leaders in women’s sport and gender equality, and by emphasising strategies for growing women’s football. Bidding nations situate themselves as benevolent rescuers of struggling women’s sport without acknowledging their accountability for policies and practices that disenfranchised women’s football in the first place. This article argues that the mobilisation of gender equality discourses by bidding nations problematically uses neoliberal feminist logics, stripping pro-women messages such as equal opportunity and empowerment of political context and repackaging them in commercially viable ways. Ultimately, although bidding nations use discourses of gender equality to position themselves favourably, existing levels of gender inequality reveal the limits of their positioning.