March 26, 2025 • 28 mins
While men have taken the lion’s share of media attention across motorsport, there have been women who would gain substantial coverages. From Brittany Force to Hailie Deegan, women in motorsport have hit sport headlines on various networks and modalities. While coverage of women in motorsport may be more positive, in terms of quantity and perception (driver talent versus overt sexism, etc.), has academia had any sort of focus on women in motorsport?
The purpose of the current literature review is to summarize the current academic literature across two repositories (EBSCO Host & Google Scholar) to gain a broader understanding of this academic realm of inquiry. Various search term including Women in Racing and variants were included in the search. Initial results suggest that women in motorsport are often a part of academic research, but are less so the main focus. Using the PRISMA methodology, articles were selected from relevant criteria and reduced from a larger sample. Methods and themes from articles will be discussed.
Mike Stocz is the assistant director for the department of kinesiology, and a senior lecturer of sport management & leadership at the University of New Hampshire. He is one of the founding members and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Motorsport Culture & History. Mike's recent works have included a co-authored book chapter about the future of Formula 1, as well as works surrounding big game hunting legislation on land preserves, an economic funding model for college athletics, and critiques on K-12 coaching certifications surrounding sexual assault.
===== (Oo---x---oO) =====
00:00 Women in Motorsport: An Academic Review 00:43 Research Methodology and Criteria 01:42 Presentation Overview and Initial Thoughts 02:48 Historical Context and Current Participation 03:55 Systematic Review Process 05:10 Database Search and Results 11:20 Themes and Findings 17:26 Discussion and Future Research 20:49 Audience Q&A 25:28 Conclusion and Acknowledgements====================
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This episode is part of our HISTORY OF MOTORSPORTS SERIES and is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family - and was recorded in front of a live studio audience.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
BreakFix's History of Motorsportsseries is brought to you in part
by the International Motor RacingResearch Center, as well as the
Society of Automotive Historians,the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.
A literature review onwomen in motorsport.
By Michael Stokes.
(00:20):
While men have taken the lion'sshare of media attention across
motorsport, there have been womenwho had gained substantial coverages.
From Britney Forrest to HayleyDeegan, women in motorsport
have hit sport headlines onvarious networks and modalities.
While coverage of women in motorsport maybe more positive in terms of quantity and
perception, driver talent versus overtsexism, et cetera, Has academia had any
(00:41):
sort of focus on women in motorsport?
The purpose of the current literaturereview is to summarize the current
academic literature across tworepositories, EBSCOhost and Google
Scholar, to gain a broader understandingof this academic realm of inquiry.
Various search terms, includingwomen in racing and variants,
were included in the search.
Initial results suggest that women inmotorsport are often a part of academic
(01:03):
research, but are less so the main focus.
Using the PRISMA methodology, articleswere selected from relevant criteria
and reduced from a larger sample.
Methods and themes fromarticles will be discussed.
Mike Stokes is an AssistantDirector for the Department of
Kinesiology and Senior Lecturer ofSport Management and Leadership at
the University of New Hampshire.
He is one of the founding membersand Editor in Chief of the Journal
(01:25):
of Motorsport Culture and History.
Mike's recent works have included aco authored book chapter about the
future of Formula One, as well aswork surrounding big game hunting
legislation on land preserves, aneconomic funding model for college
athletics, and critiques on K 12 coachingcertifications surrounding sexual assault.
All right.
Good afternoon, everybody.
My name is Mike Stoats.
(01:46):
There's another name on there, so Idefinitely want to acknowledge him.
His name is Caleb McChesney.
He just recently graduated andhelped me out with this project.
Earlier, during Lynn's keynote, therewas kind of a paraphrased quote that
she said that I quickly wrote downbecause I thought, this is somewhat
related to how, up until this point,this research project has gone.
(02:11):
And the quote was there aren't enoughwomen drivers to portray the depth within
the sport, which also kind of went on tomean, you know, the administrators and
such across the sport, but here and howit really comes into this presentation.
Is there's a lot more opportunityfor not just historical research,
(02:33):
but academic research across variousdisciplines that really isn't
being harnessed at this point.
And I think throughout the rest ofthis presentation, you'll get an idea
of the opportunity that really exists.
So, kind of an introduction to this, acouple of years ago, Dan Simone mentioned
(02:54):
that he put on a panel on women in motorsports, and this is one of the ideas
that came from that, for me anyways.
There was another idea I had last yearabout women in motor sports podcasts.
After completing that, I thought, weneed to take a step back and actually
analyze from an academic sense.
What is actually out there?
(03:15):
So some previous research to hassuggested that motorsport, not just
NASCAR, but motorsport in general,is a male dominated, sometimes
referred to as a form of a fraternitytype of situation and atmosphere.
Although, according to the Women inMotorsports North America organization, as
mentioned earlier, There are roughly over400, 000 racers that are women across 250
(03:42):
sanctioning bodies, which host over 15,000 motorsports events at 1, 200 tracks.
Layman's terms, there's a lot of interest.
There's a lot of participation thatgenerally isn't being captured.
Moving more into the academic y side ofthings, what this research is effectively
about is using a systematic methodfor reviewing academic literature.
(04:08):
And here, academic literature isdefined more as peer reviewed articles.
So, we can think if we were incollege, sometimes a professor
would hand out this article from theJournal of Sport History or similar.
Those are the types of things thatwere included in this analysis.
It was not necessarilypopular press articles.
(04:31):
Such as those you would seeacross various media entities, not
necessarily textbooks, nor books forrecreation such as faster or similar.
So here we're talking about purely peerreviewed academic articles were the
only things that were included in this.
Mentioned before that thiswas a systematic review.
The term Prisma encapsulates the processfor doing one of these systematic reviews.
(04:57):
It's a 27 step process that at 445 ona Friday we're not going to go through.
Just know that there were a lot ofdifferent steps to get down to the
final sample and then the actual review.
Where we got all of the academicarticles from were two giant databases.
Maybe most of us haven't heard of eitherof these, but essentially think of
(05:19):
them as an internet repository for whatyou would find at a massive library.
The first one in particular, EBSCOhost.
EBSCOhost has a number of differentdatabases, in which almost any topic
you can think of, there's probablysome academic literature out there.
Gambling, horse racing, you name it,there's probably a database associated
(05:42):
and has academic literature therein.
And then we decided to use anotherone that was a little bit more public.
So most of us know what Google is.
Google has a scholar website.
Which is effectively a giantrepository for academic articles.
So we figured, because previous literaturereviews haven't looked at Google Scholar,
(06:02):
that let's take a look at them and comparethem with the various EBSCOhost databases.
So when we're using thesedatabases, we have to basically
tell them, what are we looking for?
First, like, indented some pointare the general search terms
that we used for each database.
And we'll go over a little bitlater how many results came up,
(06:24):
but as you can see, we're trying toencapsulate women in sport and women
in motorsport being the prime focus ofthe article in some form or fashions.
For this, there were a number ofexclusions from our results list,
which included horse racing, drones,planes, boats, cycling, skiing,
foot racing, and baby formula, asit would relate to Formula One.
(06:47):
That was one we had to exclude.
For the eligibility status of thearticles, they had to be complete,
obviously, and one of the languagesshown on the screen, English or German.
I am NOT the German speaker in here.
That one went more towards my student.
For the selection of the articles,broadly speaking, we first looked
(07:09):
at the title of whatever the articlewas, as well as the abstract.
Think of the abstract, if youhaven't done academic research or
haven't read one of these thingsin a while, as kind of the preview.
You open up that book, that firstlittle sleeve that gives you a little
taster of what the book is about.
We can think of that as the abstract.
So those were the two at least firstpoints that we would look at, followed
(07:33):
by a full manuscript review to ensurethat the manuscript was mostly, in
quotes, mostly related to women inmotorsports in some form or fashion.
We also had to come together on one ortwo articles where it was kind of iffy on
whether or not they should be included.
We did come to full consensus for.
(07:53):
Both of them.
So as I said, there are 27 steps,and these are three of them.
Once we got the general database results,so think of when you do a general
Google search for something, it'll saydisplaying 10 of blank amount of results.
Kind of a similar thing would come up.
The first round was a general screening,generally look, title, abstract, does
(08:16):
it include our search terms, or isit primarily about our search terms?
If yes, even vaguely yes,we would keep it around.
The second one was, we took all of thearticles that got through the first
round, and did a little bit more ofan independent deep dive on them.
At this point there were a coupleof articles that For some reason,
it would come up blank, meaningthere was no text available to them.
(08:37):
Or they would come up and not Englishor German, so we threw them out.
And then the third round wasreally compiling everything or
all of the manuscripts themselvesinto one form so we could dive
in and see what they were saying.
Like I said earlier, therewas a lot of results, which is
(08:58):
why this took quite a while.
I should also mention that thisis really phase one of this.
We're going to go back and dosome other things that I'll
talk about a little bit later.
But the first bullet point isidentification of the articles.
How many search results cameup after we put in all of the
different search criteria?
(09:19):
Women in motorsports, women in NASCAR,women in Formula One, etc, etc. Of that,
within the generally academic privatedatabases, about 600 results came forward.
Through Google Scholar, thepublic site, over 6 million.
Like I said, this took a while.
The next step was the screeningstep, in which We took all of
those and reduced them down towhat could possibly be a winning
(09:43):
match for what we were looking for.
The next part, we looked at the full textarticles and excluded those that, for
whatever reason, wouldn't make the cut,and finally ended up with a final sample
base for women in motorsport academicpeer reviewed research articles of 12.
(10:03):
Starting with over six million, thatnumber may seem a little bit low.
Across other forms of academicresearch, there are similar literature
reviews that have only nine articles.
This was actually somewhat ofan encouraging sign for us.
Here's where the articles came up and thefrequency of the year that they came up.
(10:25):
A lot of the Prisma relatedliterature review searches
specify a general time frame.
We decided to keep ours very openand going back to 1950 until present.
A lot more of them are constrained.
Most of the results, as you cansee, happened 2002 and later,
with a couple of years having twoarticles published in that year.
(10:48):
Where they ended up, they were HumanitiesResearch, International Journal of Sport
History, Journal of Sport and SocialIssues, International Journal of Sports
Marketing and Sponsorship, ProfessionalEngineering, European Journal of
Women's Studies, Women's History Review,Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School.
The German one.
We're just going to go with that.
I'm not going to butcher it.
(11:08):
Journal of Popular Culture, Medicineand Science in Sports and Exercise,
and Accident Analysis and Prevention.
Each of the journals really only had one.
Submission from here.
When we're talking about the differentsubjects that we see, one thing that
was surprising was we were able to findsome exercise science based articles.
(11:30):
Generally, exercise science orkinesiology researchers will look at how
the body reacts to different exerciseregiments or different stressors.
So, it was very nice to seethat women were included in
some of these studies as well.
Some of my previous, I thinkactually every single time I've
presented here, I've included what'scalled results from Lexamancer.
(11:52):
What we did for all of the articlesthat made the cut was we did
something called a content analysis.
So we would go through andfind themes from within each
of the articles and build.
Bigger, bigger, bigger themes.
Lexamancer is a computer programthat does something similar,
just it being independent.
(12:13):
A lot of times, Lexamancer willthrow out something weird, or call it
something weird, in which we kind ofcorrected it, made sure that it was
more related to what we wanted instead.
The main themes that came from Our samplebase were gendered motor sports in which
Lexa Mansur came up with drivers, academicwork environment, which Lexa Mansur came
(12:36):
up with article, research and development,as well as exertion in which the computer
came up with vehicle and stress, andexclusion in which the majority of the
results that Lexa Mansur came up withhad the tag of women included in them.
For gendered motor sports, thistheme was shown basically of women
navigating the motorsports world.
(12:58):
So for example, it is hypothesizedthat women's bodies in motorsport
are seen in three ways.
Beyond vehicles, navigating thespace filled with other bodies
and their respective vehicles.
With vehicles, coordinating thetechnology of the vehicle itself.
And inside vehicles, which is operatingin the space of the technology,
interacting with the technology, butsituated by the gender's discursively
(13:22):
constructed characteristics.
This is from Plugfelder 2009.
So some of those that fell into thisgeneral theme, either gender neutral
or men, as seen instead of pretendingthat some sports are gender neutral.
And we need to try and understand howthe discourses that surround different
sports help create driver identitybecause of the technology that may
(13:46):
overwhelm any gender distinctions.
That was another one from PlugFelder that was a couple pages later.
Academic work environment, again, thiswas kind of how academic works surrounding
gender studies and how they interactedwith in the context of motorsport.
An example from one of the articles,indeed following Alfred Adler's
(14:06):
groundbreaking recent scholarship,substantiates that tend to overcompensate
in a sense of overdoing gender andin so doing inadvertently reveal
themselves to be sensitive to threats.
The R. N. D. And exertion.
The exertion ones in particular werestudies of how either injuries or actual
(14:27):
physical exertion like loss of sweatchanges and glucose levels and similar
would occur for both male and femaledrivers and on track simulation or an
actual measurement after It's worthmentioning here is that there were many
studies across the potential samplethat did not include any representatives
(14:48):
that were women, meaning in the onesthat were not included in this part,
but there were a lot of studies thatjust looked at male drivers from
an exercise science perspective.
And exclusion.
Exclusion referred to instancesacross the data set where women were
being excluded from racing or werebeing pressured not to participate.
For example, after dispelling somevery early prejudice in the 1930s
(15:13):
domesticization of women coupled withthe rapid professionalism of the sport
has Limited participatory opportunitiesand continue to fuel mediated stereotypes
about women drivers and in motor sportswomen have had to fight prejudice and
bias in a sport dominated by men as menmade the rules to suit themselves and
the Women were expected to accept them.
(15:35):
That's from Matthews and Pike in 2016and their article titled what on earth
are they doing in a race car towards anunderstanding of women in motor sports?
so some of the titles Definitely showa negative side to that power dynamic.
So after looking at these results, oneof the things we wanted to see was how
(15:55):
different would this be if we basicallydidn't use those 27 criteria that I
talked about, but reduce that list downto basically say if an article mentions
women in any form or fashion through thefull text, how would those results differ?
So we basically did thesame thing over again.
(16:16):
So the postdoc results and postdochere means we didn't experiment.
We thought of something funny afterwards.
So we're going to chase that rabbit downthat rabbit hole and see what happens.
So we had three general themes forthis one, which included competition
and fandom, which Lexa Mancer said wasracing and NASCAR gendered motor sports.
Which Lex and Lancer pumpedout with women and Faye Taylor.
(16:39):
Faye Taylor was one of the subjectsfor one of the manuscripts and
it was interesting to see thatthe computer analysis pumped
that out as a separate theme.
And then measurements, which is basicallyhow did the original authors, what
did they do with their experiment,which Lexamancer came up with, used.
(17:01):
So for these, the differenceswere pretty stunning.
In that there was a little bit ofcrossover, but for whatever reason, an
independent computer pumped out one ofthe articles itself as its own theme.
So we kind of foundthat interesting there.
And most of the resultswere geared towards.
(17:23):
Men in that portion, male drivers.
So some of the discussionbits, to start to wrap up.
When we started this, I told mystudent I would be surprised if
there were six or seven articles.
Thinking that, that mightbe the high end of things.
We were pleasantlysurprised on that front.
But there's definitely a lot more workthat can be done from an academic sense.
(17:44):
We obviously need to look fordifferent ways to analyze women in
motorsports from different perspectives.
We need to keep doing the history stuff.
We need to get the history stuffout there a little bit more.
But some of the speculation as to whywe're not able to do that is, in many
of the history articles themselves,we found that yes, the The article
(18:07):
included a substantial amount ofracing overview of the women driver
from a biographical sense, but itwas usually tied to something else.
So we mentioned Faye Taylor earlier,and in the article that was basically
a biopic of Faye Taylor, it startsoff mostly describing her as a
racer, some of the public renown thatshe had, but eventually goes into
(18:30):
her life, her political feelings.
Which were overwhelmingly fascist,and her interactions with MI5 and the
CIA because of those fascist leanings.
So, one of the things that we thought is,it's weird that we're not really talking
about the drivers in some sense, andwe got another sense too, that many of
(18:51):
these peer reviewers may say, well it'sjust racing, we need a little bit more.
And we argue that youdon't really need that.
Now there's obviously a crowd offolks who have an interest in this.
I think we can get a lot of thingsgoing, particularly through SAH and a
shameless plug for my journal, JMCH.
So to end with.
(19:12):
One of the articles actually had somecool photos about the Red X around
Australia trials around the 1950s.
So picture one was a women'sweekly magazine crew that entered
the Red X around Australia andfeatured an all women's team
which included military members.
(19:32):
Picture 2 features Winifred Conway, whowhen trying to find sponsorships for the
Reddix around Australia races in 1953,had to call over 100 businesses to secure
minor sponsorships for her vehicle.
Sydney Australian Austin dealershipwas approached to sponsor Conway's
Austin A40, in which they told herthat they already sponsored two teams
(19:53):
and would not sponsor her vehicle.
In response, Conway said thatshe was driving a Monarch from
Germany, totally fictitious vehicle.
And other than the experience of thedrive itself, Conway said that she was
really only in the race to compete for aprize of an automatic pop up toaster in
which Women's Weekly, Red X Organizers,and the owner of the previously mentioned
(20:14):
dealership would supply her with one each.
So she tripled what herexpected winnings were.
But at the end of the day, and thepoint of this whole article is, we have
a base of where women in motorsportsis from an academic sense, and I think
we can do a hell of a lot better.
Thank you for your time.
(20:37):
Thanks, Mike.
I was hoping you could condensethat down to two or three articles
I could pick up on my way hometonight, but I got a list here.
That was pretty fascinating.
very much for your presentation.
I do have one scholarly critique.
Sure.
When you use search terms that you'relimiting the title and abstract to women.
(20:58):
I think you are very muchpresenting a narrow perspective.
It's articles that arefocusing on women as other.
It's harping on thefact that they're women.
Versus the numerous articles thatare out there discussing, you
know, racing drivers who are quitesuccessful who, oh, happen to be women.
And And I just think that that perhapscolors some of the results that you
(21:22):
wind up with and how narrow they are.
Yes.
As I mentioned in thebeginning, this is part one.
Part two was getting more at that.
Of looking at successful driverswho happen to be women and
including them in the search terms.
After five million, we needed a break.
Six million, whatever it was.
So like I said, this is part one.
I expect there to be a little bit more,but yeah Thank you for your comment
(21:42):
Francis the Baconator says is there anincrease in the frequency of literature
as we are starting to focus more onthe history of women in motorsports and
are pushing for more participation Hmm.
The only, I wouldn't even call it hardcoregreat evidence to back up Francis the
Baconator's comment would be this slideof the frequency of publications per
(22:06):
year, in which, yeah, there were twoin 2023, and kind of suggests that
there's more of a positively goingtrend post 2015, but There's really not
enough data points to even make thatpoint for sure, but subjectively, yeah,
you might be on onto something there.
Great name, for instance, theBaconator follow up to that.
(22:26):
You show 11 out of the 12 in there.
Do you remember where the 12th one was?
What year was in?
Wow.
So I do.
That tells you there is a trend.
Yes.
Since 2000, let's say thatthere is an increase in it.
And certainly, I think everybody'sawareness of People that are working
outside of the normal standards of jobs.
(22:50):
So I think the same thing wouldapply to male nurses, for instance.
You would find out that there's morewritten on those types of things
since the years 2000 or some place.
And up because we're puttingmore focus in our world today on.
It's acceptable.
It's okay for people to do the nonstandard, if you will, occupations.
(23:13):
I mean, my wife is an engineer.
She graduated in 79.
I think I can count on both handsthe number of female engineers.
She graduated with, you know,thanks for pointing that out 2016.
It's 2016, so add one to 2016.
Elizabeth Blackstock writes, We'vetalked about Faye Taylor's fascism
and touched on Helen Nice's potentialNazi ties in to Lin's keynote.
(23:37):
Is there a larger trend of tying women inmotorsport to politics as opposed to men?
Um, maybe for academic research,another one of the articles to give
an example from the expanded search.
It occurred during the Bush versus Gorepresidential race, and it was about
NASCAR dads and protective mothers.
(24:01):
I forget the exact term that was usedthere, but it did seem that there was
Maybe not to the extent of it beingsubstantial, but there was evidence of
some politicalization there, for sure.
Um, she was, um, a very good female racer.
(24:22):
It was post, like, World War II,about the time frame that most of
the article was written about her.
Let's just leave it at that.
Do you consider women in the publishingindustry, like Denise McCluggage, or
Alana Sher, who writes for Car andDriver, etc., or Beverly Rae Kimes,
I think her name was, the historian?
Those publications are great, butthey were not included in this
(24:45):
sample, mostly because they weren'tacademic, peer reviewed in one
of our more academic journals.
So that's why they weren'tconsidered for this.
Essays and books.
Yes, so there was one, the mathematicsteaching in middle school, but
really that was the only one that wefound through this search process.
(25:06):
I'm sure there's more, whichkind of speaks to redefining
the search terms as well.
And how many grad students doyou go through on this project?
One undergraduate student.
We were both men, admittedly.
Well, thanks Mike.
That was fascinating.
Thank you all.
(25:28):
This episode is brought to youin part by the International
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Its charter is to collect,share, and preserve the history
of motor sports spanningcontinence, eras, and race series.
The Center's collection embodiesthe speed, drama and camaraderie
of amateur and professional motorracing throughout the world.
(25:52):
The Center welcomes serious researchersand casual fans alike to share stories of
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To learn more about the Center, visit www.
(26:13):
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org.
This episode is also brought to you bythe Society of Automotive Historians.
They encourage research into anyaspect of automotive history.
The SAH actively supports the compilationand preservation of papers, organizational
records, print ephemera, and images tosafeguard, as well as to broaden and
(26:37):
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For more informationabout the SAH, visit www.
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Society of Automotive Historians,the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.
A literature review onwomen in motorsport.
By Michael Stokes.
(00:20):
While men have taken the lion'sshare of media attention across
motorsport, there have been womenwho had gained substantial coverages.
From Britney Forrest to HayleyDeegan, women in motorsport
have hit sport headlines onvarious networks and modalities.
While coverage of women in motorsport maybe more positive in terms of quantity and
perception, driver talent versus overtsexism, et cetera, Has academia had any
(00:41):
sort of focus on women in motorsport?
The purpose of the current literaturereview is to summarize the current
academic literature across tworepositories, EBSCOhost and Google
Scholar, to gain a broader understandingof this academic realm of inquiry.
Various search terms, includingwomen in racing and variants,
were included in the search.
Initial results suggest that women inmotorsport are often a part of academic
(01:03):
research, but are less so the main focus.
Using the PRISMA methodology, articleswere selected from relevant criteria
and reduced from a larger sample.
Methods and themes fromarticles will be discussed.
Mike Stokes is an AssistantDirector for the Department of
Kinesiology and Senior Lecturer ofSport Management and Leadership at
the University of New Hampshire.
He is one of the founding membersand Editor in Chief of the Journal
(01:25):
of Motorsport Culture and History.
Mike's recent works have included aco authored book chapter about the
future of Formula One, as well aswork surrounding big game hunting
legislation on land preserves, aneconomic funding model for college
athletics, and critiques on K 12 coachingcertifications surrounding sexual assault.
All right.
Good afternoon, everybody.
My name is Mike Stoats.
(01:46):
There's another name on there, so Idefinitely want to acknowledge him.
His name is Caleb McChesney.
He just recently graduated andhelped me out with this project.
Earlier, during Lynn's keynote, therewas kind of a paraphrased quote that
she said that I quickly wrote downbecause I thought, this is somewhat
related to how, up until this point,this research project has gone.
(02:11):
And the quote was there aren't enoughwomen drivers to portray the depth within
the sport, which also kind of went on tomean, you know, the administrators and
such across the sport, but here and howit really comes into this presentation.
Is there's a lot more opportunityfor not just historical research,
(02:33):
but academic research across variousdisciplines that really isn't
being harnessed at this point.
And I think throughout the rest ofthis presentation, you'll get an idea
of the opportunity that really exists.
So, kind of an introduction to this, acouple of years ago, Dan Simone mentioned
(02:54):
that he put on a panel on women in motorsports, and this is one of the ideas
that came from that, for me anyways.
There was another idea I had last yearabout women in motor sports podcasts.
After completing that, I thought, weneed to take a step back and actually
analyze from an academic sense.
What is actually out there?
(03:15):
So some previous research to hassuggested that motorsport, not just
NASCAR, but motorsport in general,is a male dominated, sometimes
referred to as a form of a fraternitytype of situation and atmosphere.
Although, according to the Women inMotorsports North America organization, as
mentioned earlier, There are roughly over400, 000 racers that are women across 250
(03:42):
sanctioning bodies, which host over 15,000 motorsports events at 1, 200 tracks.
Layman's terms, there's a lot of interest.
There's a lot of participation thatgenerally isn't being captured.
Moving more into the academic y side ofthings, what this research is effectively
about is using a systematic methodfor reviewing academic literature.
(04:08):
And here, academic literature isdefined more as peer reviewed articles.
So, we can think if we were incollege, sometimes a professor
would hand out this article from theJournal of Sport History or similar.
Those are the types of things thatwere included in this analysis.
It was not necessarilypopular press articles.
(04:31):
Such as those you would seeacross various media entities, not
necessarily textbooks, nor books forrecreation such as faster or similar.
So here we're talking about purely peerreviewed academic articles were the
only things that were included in this.
Mentioned before that thiswas a systematic review.
The term Prisma encapsulates the processfor doing one of these systematic reviews.
(04:57):
It's a 27 step process that at 445 ona Friday we're not going to go through.
Just know that there were a lot ofdifferent steps to get down to the
final sample and then the actual review.
Where we got all of the academicarticles from were two giant databases.
Maybe most of us haven't heard of eitherof these, but essentially think of
(05:19):
them as an internet repository for whatyou would find at a massive library.
The first one in particular, EBSCOhost.
EBSCOhost has a number of differentdatabases, in which almost any topic
you can think of, there's probablysome academic literature out there.
Gambling, horse racing, you name it,there's probably a database associated
(05:42):
and has academic literature therein.
And then we decided to use anotherone that was a little bit more public.
So most of us know what Google is.
Google has a scholar website.
Which is effectively a giantrepository for academic articles.
So we figured, because previous literaturereviews haven't looked at Google Scholar,
(06:02):
that let's take a look at them and comparethem with the various EBSCOhost databases.
So when we're using thesedatabases, we have to basically
tell them, what are we looking for?
First, like, indented some pointare the general search terms
that we used for each database.
And we'll go over a little bitlater how many results came up,
(06:24):
but as you can see, we're trying toencapsulate women in sport and women
in motorsport being the prime focus ofthe article in some form or fashions.
For this, there were a number ofexclusions from our results list,
which included horse racing, drones,planes, boats, cycling, skiing,
foot racing, and baby formula, asit would relate to Formula One.
(06:47):
That was one we had to exclude.
For the eligibility status of thearticles, they had to be complete,
obviously, and one of the languagesshown on the screen, English or German.
I am NOT the German speaker in here.
That one went more towards my student.
For the selection of the articles,broadly speaking, we first looked
(07:09):
at the title of whatever the articlewas, as well as the abstract.
Think of the abstract, if youhaven't done academic research or
haven't read one of these thingsin a while, as kind of the preview.
You open up that book, that firstlittle sleeve that gives you a little
taster of what the book is about.
We can think of that as the abstract.
So those were the two at least firstpoints that we would look at, followed
(07:33):
by a full manuscript review to ensurethat the manuscript was mostly, in
quotes, mostly related to women inmotorsports in some form or fashion.
We also had to come together on one ortwo articles where it was kind of iffy on
whether or not they should be included.
We did come to full consensus for.
(07:53):
Both of them.
So as I said, there are 27 steps,and these are three of them.
Once we got the general database results,so think of when you do a general
Google search for something, it'll saydisplaying 10 of blank amount of results.
Kind of a similar thing would come up.
The first round was a general screening,generally look, title, abstract, does
(08:16):
it include our search terms, or isit primarily about our search terms?
If yes, even vaguely yes,we would keep it around.
The second one was, we took all of thearticles that got through the first
round, and did a little bit more ofan independent deep dive on them.
At this point there were a coupleof articles that For some reason,
it would come up blank, meaningthere was no text available to them.
(08:37):
Or they would come up and not Englishor German, so we threw them out.
And then the third round wasreally compiling everything or
all of the manuscripts themselvesinto one form so we could dive
in and see what they were saying.
Like I said earlier, therewas a lot of results, which is
(08:58):
why this took quite a while.
I should also mention that thisis really phase one of this.
We're going to go back and dosome other things that I'll
talk about a little bit later.
But the first bullet point isidentification of the articles.
How many search results cameup after we put in all of the
different search criteria?
(09:19):
Women in motorsports, women in NASCAR,women in Formula One, etc, etc. Of that,
within the generally academic privatedatabases, about 600 results came forward.
Through Google Scholar, thepublic site, over 6 million.
Like I said, this took a while.
The next step was the screeningstep, in which We took all of
those and reduced them down towhat could possibly be a winning
(09:43):
match for what we were looking for.
The next part, we looked at the full textarticles and excluded those that, for
whatever reason, wouldn't make the cut,and finally ended up with a final sample
base for women in motorsport academicpeer reviewed research articles of 12.
(10:03):
Starting with over six million, thatnumber may seem a little bit low.
Across other forms of academicresearch, there are similar literature
reviews that have only nine articles.
This was actually somewhat ofan encouraging sign for us.
Here's where the articles came up and thefrequency of the year that they came up.
(10:25):
A lot of the Prisma relatedliterature review searches
specify a general time frame.
We decided to keep ours very openand going back to 1950 until present.
A lot more of them are constrained.
Most of the results, as you cansee, happened 2002 and later,
with a couple of years having twoarticles published in that year.
(10:48):
Where they ended up, they were HumanitiesResearch, International Journal of Sport
History, Journal of Sport and SocialIssues, International Journal of Sports
Marketing and Sponsorship, ProfessionalEngineering, European Journal of
Women's Studies, Women's History Review,Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School.
The German one.
We're just going to go with that.
I'm not going to butcher it.
(11:08):
Journal of Popular Culture, Medicineand Science in Sports and Exercise,
and Accident Analysis and Prevention.
Each of the journals really only had one.
Submission from here.
When we're talking about the differentsubjects that we see, one thing that
was surprising was we were able to findsome exercise science based articles.
(11:30):
Generally, exercise science orkinesiology researchers will look at how
the body reacts to different exerciseregiments or different stressors.
So, it was very nice to seethat women were included in
some of these studies as well.
Some of my previous, I thinkactually every single time I've
presented here, I've included what'scalled results from Lexamancer.
(11:52):
What we did for all of the articlesthat made the cut was we did
something called a content analysis.
So we would go through andfind themes from within each
of the articles and build.
Bigger, bigger, bigger themes.
Lexamancer is a computer programthat does something similar,
just it being independent.
(12:13):
A lot of times, Lexamancer willthrow out something weird, or call it
something weird, in which we kind ofcorrected it, made sure that it was
more related to what we wanted instead.
The main themes that came from Our samplebase were gendered motor sports in which
Lexa Mansur came up with drivers, academicwork environment, which Lexa Mansur came
(12:36):
up with article, research and development,as well as exertion in which the computer
came up with vehicle and stress, andexclusion in which the majority of the
results that Lexa Mansur came up withhad the tag of women included in them.
For gendered motor sports, thistheme was shown basically of women
navigating the motorsports world.
(12:58):
So for example, it is hypothesizedthat women's bodies in motorsport
are seen in three ways.
Beyond vehicles, navigating thespace filled with other bodies
and their respective vehicles.
With vehicles, coordinating thetechnology of the vehicle itself.
And inside vehicles, which is operatingin the space of the technology,
interacting with the technology, butsituated by the gender's discursively
(13:22):
constructed characteristics.
This is from Plugfelder 2009.
So some of those that fell into thisgeneral theme, either gender neutral
or men, as seen instead of pretendingthat some sports are gender neutral.
And we need to try and understand howthe discourses that surround different
sports help create driver identitybecause of the technology that may
(13:46):
overwhelm any gender distinctions.
That was another one from PlugFelder that was a couple pages later.
Academic work environment, again, thiswas kind of how academic works surrounding
gender studies and how they interactedwith in the context of motorsport.
An example from one of the articles,indeed following Alfred Adler's
(14:06):
groundbreaking recent scholarship,substantiates that tend to overcompensate
in a sense of overdoing gender andin so doing inadvertently reveal
themselves to be sensitive to threats.
The R. N. D. And exertion.
The exertion ones in particular werestudies of how either injuries or actual
(14:27):
physical exertion like loss of sweatchanges and glucose levels and similar
would occur for both male and femaledrivers and on track simulation or an
actual measurement after It's worthmentioning here is that there were many
studies across the potential samplethat did not include any representatives
(14:48):
that were women, meaning in the onesthat were not included in this part,
but there were a lot of studies thatjust looked at male drivers from
an exercise science perspective.
And exclusion.
Exclusion referred to instancesacross the data set where women were
being excluded from racing or werebeing pressured not to participate.
For example, after dispelling somevery early prejudice in the 1930s
(15:13):
domesticization of women coupled withthe rapid professionalism of the sport
has Limited participatory opportunitiesand continue to fuel mediated stereotypes
about women drivers and in motor sportswomen have had to fight prejudice and
bias in a sport dominated by men as menmade the rules to suit themselves and
the Women were expected to accept them.
(15:35):
That's from Matthews and Pike in 2016and their article titled what on earth
are they doing in a race car towards anunderstanding of women in motor sports?
so some of the titles Definitely showa negative side to that power dynamic.
So after looking at these results, oneof the things we wanted to see was how
(15:55):
different would this be if we basicallydidn't use those 27 criteria that I
talked about, but reduce that list downto basically say if an article mentions
women in any form or fashion through thefull text, how would those results differ?
So we basically did thesame thing over again.
(16:16):
So the postdoc results and postdochere means we didn't experiment.
We thought of something funny afterwards.
So we're going to chase that rabbit downthat rabbit hole and see what happens.
So we had three general themes forthis one, which included competition
and fandom, which Lexa Mancer said wasracing and NASCAR gendered motor sports.
Which Lex and Lancer pumpedout with women and Faye Taylor.
(16:39):
Faye Taylor was one of the subjectsfor one of the manuscripts and
it was interesting to see thatthe computer analysis pumped
that out as a separate theme.
And then measurements, which is basicallyhow did the original authors, what
did they do with their experiment,which Lexamancer came up with, used.
(17:01):
So for these, the differenceswere pretty stunning.
In that there was a little bit ofcrossover, but for whatever reason, an
independent computer pumped out one ofthe articles itself as its own theme.
So we kind of foundthat interesting there.
And most of the resultswere geared towards.
(17:23):
Men in that portion, male drivers.
So some of the discussionbits, to start to wrap up.
When we started this, I told mystudent I would be surprised if
there were six or seven articles.
Thinking that, that mightbe the high end of things.
We were pleasantlysurprised on that front.
But there's definitely a lot more workthat can be done from an academic sense.
(17:44):
We obviously need to look fordifferent ways to analyze women in
motorsports from different perspectives.
We need to keep doing the history stuff.
We need to get the history stuffout there a little bit more.
But some of the speculation as to whywe're not able to do that is, in many
of the history articles themselves,we found that yes, the The article
(18:07):
included a substantial amount ofracing overview of the women driver
from a biographical sense, but itwas usually tied to something else.
So we mentioned Faye Taylor earlier,and in the article that was basically
a biopic of Faye Taylor, it startsoff mostly describing her as a
racer, some of the public renown thatshe had, but eventually goes into
(18:30):
her life, her political feelings.
Which were overwhelmingly fascist,and her interactions with MI5 and the
CIA because of those fascist leanings.
So, one of the things that we thought is,it's weird that we're not really talking
about the drivers in some sense, andwe got another sense too, that many of
(18:51):
these peer reviewers may say, well it'sjust racing, we need a little bit more.
And we argue that youdon't really need that.
Now there's obviously a crowd offolks who have an interest in this.
I think we can get a lot of thingsgoing, particularly through SAH and a
shameless plug for my journal, JMCH.
So to end with.
(19:12):
One of the articles actually had somecool photos about the Red X around
Australia trials around the 1950s.
So picture one was a women'sweekly magazine crew that entered
the Red X around Australia andfeatured an all women's team
which included military members.
(19:32):
Picture 2 features Winifred Conway, whowhen trying to find sponsorships for the
Reddix around Australia races in 1953,had to call over 100 businesses to secure
minor sponsorships for her vehicle.
Sydney Australian Austin dealershipwas approached to sponsor Conway's
Austin A40, in which they told herthat they already sponsored two teams
(19:53):
and would not sponsor her vehicle.
In response, Conway said thatshe was driving a Monarch from
Germany, totally fictitious vehicle.
And other than the experience of thedrive itself, Conway said that she was
really only in the race to compete for aprize of an automatic pop up toaster in
which Women's Weekly, Red X Organizers,and the owner of the previously mentioned
(20:14):
dealership would supply her with one each.
So she tripled what herexpected winnings were.
But at the end of the day, and thepoint of this whole article is, we have
a base of where women in motorsportsis from an academic sense, and I think
we can do a hell of a lot better.
Thank you for your time.
(20:37):
Thanks, Mike.
I was hoping you could condensethat down to two or three articles
I could pick up on my way hometonight, but I got a list here.
That was pretty fascinating.
very much for your presentation.
I do have one scholarly critique.
Sure.
When you use search terms that you'relimiting the title and abstract to women.
(20:58):
I think you are very muchpresenting a narrow perspective.
It's articles that arefocusing on women as other.
It's harping on thefact that they're women.
Versus the numerous articles thatare out there discussing, you
know, racing drivers who are quitesuccessful who, oh, happen to be women.
And And I just think that that perhapscolors some of the results that you
(21:22):
wind up with and how narrow they are.
Yes.
As I mentioned in thebeginning, this is part one.
Part two was getting more at that.
Of looking at successful driverswho happen to be women and
including them in the search terms.
After five million, we needed a break.
Six million, whatever it was.
So like I said, this is part one.
I expect there to be a little bit more,but yeah Thank you for your comment
(21:42):
Francis the Baconator says is there anincrease in the frequency of literature
as we are starting to focus more onthe history of women in motorsports and
are pushing for more participation Hmm.
The only, I wouldn't even call it hardcoregreat evidence to back up Francis the
Baconator's comment would be this slideof the frequency of publications per
(22:06):
year, in which, yeah, there were twoin 2023, and kind of suggests that
there's more of a positively goingtrend post 2015, but There's really not
enough data points to even make thatpoint for sure, but subjectively, yeah,
you might be on onto something there.
Great name, for instance, theBaconator follow up to that.
(22:26):
You show 11 out of the 12 in there.
Do you remember where the 12th one was?
What year was in?
Wow.
So I do.
That tells you there is a trend.
Yes.
Since 2000, let's say thatthere is an increase in it.
And certainly, I think everybody'sawareness of People that are working
outside of the normal standards of jobs.
(22:50):
So I think the same thing wouldapply to male nurses, for instance.
You would find out that there's morewritten on those types of things
since the years 2000 or some place.
And up because we're puttingmore focus in our world today on.
It's acceptable.
It's okay for people to do the nonstandard, if you will, occupations.
(23:13):
I mean, my wife is an engineer.
She graduated in 79.
I think I can count on both handsthe number of female engineers.
She graduated with, you know,thanks for pointing that out 2016.
It's 2016, so add one to 2016.
Elizabeth Blackstock writes, We'vetalked about Faye Taylor's fascism
and touched on Helen Nice's potentialNazi ties in to Lin's keynote.
(23:37):
Is there a larger trend of tying women inmotorsport to politics as opposed to men?
Um, maybe for academic research,another one of the articles to give
an example from the expanded search.
It occurred during the Bush versus Gorepresidential race, and it was about
NASCAR dads and protective mothers.
(24:01):
I forget the exact term that was usedthere, but it did seem that there was
Maybe not to the extent of it beingsubstantial, but there was evidence of
some politicalization there, for sure.
Um, she was, um, a very good female racer.
(24:22):
It was post, like, World War II,about the time frame that most of
the article was written about her.
Let's just leave it at that.
Do you consider women in the publishingindustry, like Denise McCluggage, or
Alana Sher, who writes for Car andDriver, etc., or Beverly Rae Kimes,
I think her name was, the historian?
Those publications are great, butthey were not included in this
(24:45):
sample, mostly because they weren'tacademic, peer reviewed in one
of our more academic journals.
So that's why they weren'tconsidered for this.
Essays and books.
Yes, so there was one, the mathematicsteaching in middle school, but
really that was the only one that wefound through this search process.
(25:06):
I'm sure there's more, whichkind of speaks to redefining
the search terms as well.
And how many grad students doyou go through on this project?
One undergraduate student.
We were both men, admittedly.
Well, thanks Mike.
That was fascinating.
Thank you all.
(25:28):
This episode is brought to youin part by the International
Motor Racing Research Center.
Its charter is to collect,share, and preserve the history
of motor sports spanningcontinence, eras, and race series.
The Center's collection embodiesthe speed, drama and camaraderie
of amateur and professional motorracing throughout the world.
(25:52):
The Center welcomes serious researchersand casual fans alike to share stories of
race drivers, race series, and race carscaptured on their shelves and walls and
brought to life through a regular calendarof public lectures and special events.
To learn more about the Center, visit www.
(26:13):
racingarchives.
org.
This episode is also brought to you bythe Society of Automotive Historians.
They encourage research into anyaspect of automotive history.
The SAH actively supports the compilationand preservation of papers, organizational
records, print ephemera, and images tosafeguard, as well as to broaden and
(26:37):
deepen the understanding of motorizedwheeled land transportation through
the modern age and into the future.
For more informationabout the SAH, visit www.
autohistory.
org.
We hope you enjoyed another awesomeepisode of Brake Fix Podcast, brought
(27:01):
to you by Grand Touring Motorsports.
If you'd like to be a guest onthe show or get involved, be sure
to follow us on all social mediaplatforms at GrandTouringMotorsports.
And if you'd like to learn moreabout the content of this episode,
be sure to check out the followon article at GTMotorsports.
org.
We remain a commercial free and noannual fees organization through
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