For the first time in the history of the Women’s Football World Cup, FIFA has called on a trio of female referees of French nationality to officiate certain matches in the competition, which takes place from July 20 to August 20, 2023, in Australia and New Zealand. For this edition, seasoned central referee Stéphanie Frappart will team up with fellow assistant referees Manuela Nicolosi and Élodie Coppola.
If this news appears a priori as a sign of good health for French women’s refereeing, it also highlights the inability of the French Football Federation (FFF) to “provide”, until then, to Fifa, three female referees to officiate at major events.
At the end of the 1960s, the FFF (finally) allowed women to become official football referees. This entry into arbitration is not without difficulty. These pioneers are, for example, only authorized to referee children’s or teenagers’ matches. But no matter, Marie-Anne Bessard, Geneviève Zak or even Martine Jayais have opened a door.
In 1970, when the FFF officially recognized women’s football, the latter had already issued the title of referee to about fifteen women. While some give up quickly, others, like Antoinette Pluet or Nicole Piveteau, hold on and even manage to referee senior matches at regional level. Ten years later, in 1980, there were nearly 120, but none of them served above the local level.
In the 1990s, FIFA decided to entrust the refereeing of international women’s football matches to women. Accusing a certain delay in terms of development of women’s refereeing, the FFF is not able to propose the candidacy of a French woman with the necessary skills to officiate in these matches.
To remedy the problem, the former international referee, then president of the Central Commission of Referees of the FFF at the time, Michel Vautrot, carried out a census of women referees likely to immediately access the high level as an assistant referee. . Nelly Viennot is one of those women who benefited from this accelerated promotion. In 1996, she became the first woman to officiate in the first division of the French Professional Football Championship (PSG-Martigues), as an assistant referee.
While it was thought that Nelly Viennot had broken the “glass ceiling”, it will take 23 long years and the summer of 2019 for a new woman, in the person of Stéphanie Frappart, to be named in Ligue 1, in as central referee this time. For more than half a century, the feminization of refereeing has therefore continued, but women still remain in low numbers in the field.
In 2023, there are only a little more than 1,000 women referees out of the 20,000 in the FFF. In addition to being rare, women referees are also under-represented at the highest level of French football since only three women (for 86 men) officiate in the men’s professional championships of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2: Manuela Nicolosi and Camille Soriano are assistant referees in Ligue 2 while Stéphanie Frappart is still central referee in Ligue 1. She was also the first woman to referee a Men’s World Cup match in Qatar in 2022.
The other women referees evolve in the lowest divisions of men’s football or remain confined to the refereeing of women’s football matches, considered less prestigious in the field. This distribution of women in the arbitration suggests that behind the institutional discourse displaying a good will in matters of diversity hides a sexual division of labor.
To justify the low presence of women in refereeing in general and at the federal level in particular, refereeing leaders often refer to the physical demands of the practice.
Women would not be able to compete with men, especially during the pre-selection physical tests. The example that best illustrates the obstacle represented by the passage of physical tests to the accession and ascent of women in refereeing is undoubtedly that of Nelly Viennot, who, selected by Fifa from among 82 candidates to participate in the selection of assistant referees for the 2006 World Cup, had failed in the sprint test by only two tenths of a second. She would have been the first woman to officiate at a men’s World Cup.
The leaders justify the differences in performance between men and women by the biological differences between the sexes and completely ignore the history of female practice, which nevertheless shows that the investment of women in refereeing and sport in general is late, and that this historical deficit translates into an institutional deficit in the production of women referees.
The established order therefore seems legitimate since the qualities drawn from “nature” make it possible to make inequalities of success acceptable. If the leaders publicly regret the situation, they do not plan to adapt either the selection criteria or the scales of the physical tests and even tend to raise them regularly; especially since Stéphanie Frappart manages to meet the obligations.
The second dimension is the professional stability of women referees. French women have massively invested in the labor market but remain more concerned with under-qualified jobs and more exposed to social hazards. Their level of investment in arbitration therefore varies according to the professional context in which they operate.
Most high-level women referees have a privileged professional situation. To improve the living conditions of female referees, the FFF, at the start of the 2020/2021 season, signed a service contract for a period of 1 to 3 years with eight of them. The latter now receive, in addition to match allowances, a fixed monthly remuneration supposed to allow them to evolve more serenely.
If women referees are not categorically excluded from the practice of refereeing, it is on condition that they do things differently from their male counterparts and that they respond to certain assignments related to their gender. The mix sought by the federal leaders necessarily implies this difference between men and women and leads to an essentialist vision of skills, according to which women have their own qualities and presuppositions that are different from those of men.
If all these behaviors seem a priori benevolent, by reinforcing gender stereotypes, they actually participate on the one hand in the infantilization of female referees and on the other hand in the reproduction of a gendered order.
For sociologist Erving Goffman, practices of gallantry and excessive solicitude lead everyone to stay in their place. As for Pierre Bourdieu, he explains that the attribution to women of valorizing dispositions does not eliminate male domination because it grants prejudices favorable to the female sex in order to better devalue it.
Especially since a large number of female referees consider the “feminine” qualities attributed to them as a resource: “A male referee will often enter the role of the policeman, strict and quite closed. Seeing a woman who speaks differently and is more flexible is a bonus,” said one. Women referees are therefore adorned with secondary characteristics compared to those which are usually attributed and sought after in a good (male) football referee, such as firmness, authority and composure.
Lucie Le Tiec, lecturer in sociology; Laboratory Research Center on Industry, Institutions and Economic Systems of Amiens (CRIISEA), University of Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV).