Taking up and giving up soccer. Quantifying the barriers women soccer players encounter

Following a well-established tradition of sports demography, this paper presents the sporting trajectory of soccer players with French Football Federation (FFF) licenses. Their sporting trajectories have been traced back across a period of 26 seasons (between 1992 and 2018) using administrative data from the FFF. Comparing the trajectory of women and men shows the barriers that female players still have to overcome. Their sporting trajectories appear to be less stable than men’s, except during adolescence. I will discuss how differentiating gendered aptitudes for sport and young peoples’ choices of cultural practices may help in understanding this phenomenon.