Women & Sports, VII, PEPGAS [in Greek (Oct. 2010)
Women have come a long way since the 1952 Helsinki Games, where they represented only 10 percent of the Olympic athletes. At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing women represented approximately 43 percent of the total athlete delegation, up from 41 percent in the Athens 2004 Olympics. This does not mean that their biological make-up has changed. What has changed however are the socio-cultural perceptions pertaining to gender. On the other hand, women constitute an invisible minority in sport governing bodies today.
This paper focuses on women’s underrepresentation in sport governing bodies and proposes strategies-practices of gender inclusion, including the democratization of sport institutions. The first part of the study examines current discussions on gender, gender neutrality, the gender subject and gender identity. In the new theoretical framework gender is being transformed from a static biological perception into a dynamic social cate-gory, affecting and changing identity, gender relations and the expectations of the social environment.
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