Speaker
Description
The outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic has made a significant impact on the implementation of sports policies and action plans around the world. Academia pointed out that the crisis has exacerbated gender inequality in the proportion of physical activity. Since the pandemic has provided an unfortunate setback and a challenge to the campaign of England's "This Girl Can" and Taiwan’s “White Paper on Promoting Women’s Participation in Sport”, This study aims to explore the nature of the development of women’s sport under the epidemic in two nations with different background, namely England and Taiwan, that have been committed to promoting women’s sport participation in recent years. By using a qualitative approach based on documentary material and semi-structured interviews, two complementary theoretical concepts provide a theoretical lens to the practical analysis, those of governance theory and a strategic-relational approach, which allows us to identify how such outcomes were mediated and shaped, and in particular how different sets of interests were implicated. Provisional findings are as follows: Statistics show that women’s participation rate in sports in England has only dropped by 3% due to the epidemic, while in Taiwan it has grown by 2%. However, field survey data show that during the epidemic, most of the housework was given to women and their sport participation was greatly hindered. Meanwhile, the interviewees/stakeholders indicated that the above-mentioned statistics are “beautified” data. Therefore, to understand the development of women's sports, it is necessary to integrate environmental factors and practical experience for a more comprehensive discussion.
