Women’s representation in sport

Abstract

This chapter considers how the sociopolitical and economic changes that took place in Central-Eastern Europe (CEE) since the 1990s reshaped the field of sport, both professional and amateur, in ways that are gendered. Marketization of professional sport has undermined the communist era efforts to promote gender equality, with less funding for women’s sport than for men’s. After communism, the “physical culture” that had been compulsory for both women and men was depoliticized and replaced with individualized, leisure-time sport which is more popular among men. The athletes are used for political purposes to a much lesser extent as compared to the Cold War era. Women’s discrimination in sports coaching and management is more prevalent in CEE than in Western Europe, the United States, or Australia, a trend that matches the indexes of gender equality. Moreover, in CEE, feminist organizations have mostly neglected sport, focusing their attention on what were seen as more serious and urgent social problems.