engleski

Position of Women in Judo: Can we do better?

Every day we are witnessing more and more women all over the world that are participating in sport activities, including judo. Still, women are underrepresented not only as competitors, but also in a position of coaches, refeeres, and especially in leadership roles. Therefore, many international and national sport federations and sport organizations, according to policy proposals (i.e. European Commission and International Olympic Committee) developed many ‘gender equality projects and methods’ to empower women to be more inovolved in sport and to prolong their career after competing period. As a sport judo has all prerequsites for gender equality. For many years now, important international competitions such as continental and world championships are organized for men and women, on the same mats, same rules, same duration of matches and referees. Although in many countries, especially European countries, women started to train judo together with the male athletes, judo for women was included as a sport at the Olympic games program, at 1992 in Barcelona, 28 years after Tokyo 1964, when judo become Olympic sport for men. As a consequnce, establishement of the system of national competitions for women in judo, started later than for men. As a second important barrier, judo as combat and contact sport is (perceived as) male dominated sport. At national federations – IJF and EJU members, registered number of competitors and women in all other positions (coaches, referees, administrative staff, commission members) are much smaller than those of men. Therefore, the main rationale for conducting this survey among IJF members was, first, to obtain exact numbers of women in different positions in judo, and secondly, to collect information on already started projects and ideas for empowering women in judo. This study presents survey results and analysis and give reccomendations for national judo federations, continental and to the International judo federation. The main research question is - can we do better when it comes to position of women in judo?

women, judo, position of women, gender equality, world, Europe

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