Female empowerment through sport: an exploratory narrative review

Abstract

Empowering females is a critical global priority. Sports participation is a mechanism to increase female empowerment employed throughout the world. However, measuring empowerment remains challenging because definitions often differ between geographical contexts. For example, empowerment theory constructs, especially individual or psychological empowerment, are frequently used in the Global North to examine and define empowerment. In the Global South, female empowerment, usually referred to as women’s empowerment, explicitly addresses women’s issues related to their ability to make life choices. Despite these differences, empowerment goals are similar regardless of geography within the sporting context. Therefore, this exploratory narrative review explores differences in empowerment and women’s empowerment through sports globally and describes sports empowerment as its own construct. Sports empowerment illustrates feelings of empowerment that are the product of sports experiences that spillover to daily life.

Keywords:

• Women’s agency
• autonomy
• physical health
• sport development
• review paper
• self-actualization

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge Elizabeth Rodgers, Averie Brown, Aidan Lewis, Brooke Crawford, and Murry Streetman for supporting this exploratory review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Table 1. Overview of the articles selected for full review.