Navigating the leadership labyrinth: situated knowledge, gendered constraints, and women’s coaching in Taiwan’s Division I collegiate sport

In recent years, public discourse on gender equality, accompanied by notable advances in women’s participation in traditionally male-dominated sports, has gained unprecedented visibility in Taiwan. Despite these advances, women remain underrepresented in leadership positions, reflecting persistent structural and cultural constraints. Although postfeminist scholarship often celebrates women’s empowerment and autonomy, it frequently overlooks the enduring influence of traditional gender ideologies on professional opportunities and everyday practices. Grounded in a feminist standpoint epistemology, this study adopted a qualitative interpretive design informed by hermeneutic principles to examine the leadership trajectories of seven women head coaches leading Division I teams in Taiwan’s collegiate sport system. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and analyzed using narrative analysis. This study uncovered multilayered gendered challenges, including institutional exclusion, professional scrutiny, and the internalization of normative femininity. The findings reveal that women coaches navigate a complex leadership labyrinth, using professional excellence, strategic adaptation, and relational care to negotiate legitimacy. Although they promote gender-neutral professionalism in the field, their off-field leadership often reflects cultural expectations of women’s caregiving and emotional labor. This study underscores the epistemic value of situated knowledge derived from women’s embodied experiences and highlights the enduring tensions between individual agency and structural constraints. Based on these findings, this study calls for renewed engagement with localized feminist perspectives to critically investigate the intersection among gender, leadership, and cultural ideology in non-Western sports contexts.