Tag: women in sports

This study seeks to advance understanding of, and contribute to, international policy on increasing and enhancing diversity in sport leadership and recruitment. It is founded on a unique partnership between UNESCO (specifically UNESCO Sport Section) and Loughborough University. The study will also benefit from Loughborough University’s very strong research track record and infrastructure which will ensure the effective delivery of this research (e.g. UNESCO Chair, Women in Sport, Policy Unit).

We welcome articles that consider women’s roles as athletes, coaches, officials, administrators, investors, athletic therapists, journalists, fans and even legislators. Submissions may focus on any chronological period and any geographic region and may centre amateur, community, professional and/or elite level of play. We are particularly interested in submissions offering critical analyses on how sexuality, age, race/racism, nationalism, feminism, or faith might have shaped women’s opportunities and experiences in basketball, including the organizational power of the gender binary itself.

The 2025 conference theme WiSER Together: Valuing diversity and collaborating for change acknowledges that by collectively coming together to share knowledge across disciplines, a range of contemporary challenges and societal concerns regarding women in sport and exercise can be grappled with and possible solutions identified. We look forward to welcoming a range of people to the conference including undergraduate students, post-graduate students, early career researchers, established academics, and practitioners from across different disciplines.

This special issue aims to expose and resolve the ways intercollegiate athletic programs reproduce and resist intersectional systems of gender power. For example, organizing sports according to a rigid gender binary, inequity in resource allocation for women’s vs. men’s sport, disparate pay for women coaches and administrators, and lack of racial, class, and ethnic diversity across sport opportunities. With this special issue, we seek to build critical scholarship on athletics in higher education that considers the diversity of gender expressions.

Co-funded by the University of Canberra and Sport Integrity Australia, the project will support a PhD scholar to complete a doctoral research program that will seek to identify mechanisms to reduce the insidious and increasing levels of toxic abuse online and cyber hate directed at women involved in the sport industry. In this project, we broadly define cyberbullying as hurtful messages that are threatening, humiliating, or intimidating to individuals.

Sport occupies a central position in Irish social and cultural life, yet a relatively marginal position within the academy. This symposium aims to bring together sports scholars from across the humanities and social sciences whose work is variously concerned with the contemporary and historical cultural significance of sport, and which deals with the interplay between sport, the media and cultural industries and the lived experience of sport as popular culture in Ireland and across the Irish diaspora.

We welcome submissions from authors in a variety of career stages and roles, who are able to collaboratively reflect on a missing or seldom discussed aspect of women's experience in sport and physical activity. We especially encourage submissions from BIPoC authors, those working in a transnational context, and those working in queer and non-binary framings of womanhood. More specifically, we encourage submissions that feature critical, cross-generational conversations.

This conference will have an international focus and aims to bring together practitioners and academics from a range of disciplines to allow discussions and debates of issues surrounding women’s participation in sport, exercise and physical activity. There will be an emphasis on redressing the balance through both assessing impact and highlighting future implications for practice.

This Research Topic seeks to address a gap in current scholarship, notably research that empirically examines the success and sustainability of approaches to developing, structuring, and delivering women’s professional sport. Professional sport is delimited as any sport that provides continuous paid employment and the opportunity to pursue said employment as a career.

The last decade has seen an upsurge in female participation in sport, with girls and women becoming more visible as participants at grassroots level and celebrated for their competitive achievements at elite level.  However, it is true to say that female equality in sport has not yet been achieved. It is also well known that girls and women have not always found it easy to pursue their sporting aspirations.