Delaying, delaying: athlete perspectives on contemplating motherhood in high-performance women’s rugby

As women’s sport professionalises, there is a need to focus on the working environments of female athletes, including gender-specific employment conditions such as maternity rights. In seeking to understand the professionalisation of high-performance women’s rugby in England, this paper presents an athlete-centred discussion of issues connected to the temporal journey of maternity to explore how athletes from diverse sexual identities contemplate the possibility of motherhood in high-performance team sport. Interviews with 11 female rugby players in the United Kingdom were conducted and analysed, using a Capabilities Approach framework. Findings point to a cultural unreadiness, where motherhood is broadly seen as unusual and reserved only for the ‘stars’ of the elite population. The agency of player decisions was found to be structurally influenced by their rugby environment, with players describing decisions to delay families due to financial, and broader cultural, restraints within the sport. The contemplation of motherhood for queer athletes in same-sex relationships adds additional complexity and is often a silenced consideration. Role models are found to be important in allowing athletes to contemplate the possibility of motherhood, in its variety of forms, but also reinforce the challenges that athlete-motherhood could and does bring.