Active Women Belong Everywhere
Our
Mission
We're on a mission to advance gender equity in sports and physical activity throughout the lifespan.
Our
Vision
We envision a world where how we talk about active women is empowering and intersectional, and where our FULL experiences are represented in research of all kinds. From menarche to menopause and beyond. #ActiveWomenBelongEverywhere
Our Values
Our values anchor us to each other, to our vision and mission, and to our collective. They guide us toward building a future where active women are everywhere, especially in research.
Strengths-Based
Leveraging our strengths and resilience. Not just in the gym but in how we frame our research questions and analysis.
Gender Inlusion
Trans-, cis-, non-binary folks assigned female at birth. We've been long-neglected in research. This is for us!
Intersectionality
We are beautiful mosaics of our identities and experiences. We show up as our full selves and our work aims to capture the multiple facets of being an active woman.
Advocacy
Research for the sake of it doesn't interest us. We want it to count for making our world more equitable.
Contextualization
Nothing happens in a vacuum. We live in the context of our society and histories, and bring those into what we do.
Curiousity
We probably have more questions than answers, but we like it that way. It drives us to better research and creativity.
Our Story
Like so many who play sports and enjoy physical activities, we have such fond attachments to movement and the joys and benefits they've brought us over the decades. We want everyone to have opportunities to play, move, exercise, or compete! And we want people to feel safe and confident doing so. Despite our love for movement, exercise, and even competition, we weren't always given the best guidance on how to care for our bodies, how to feel safe, and where to get information. There were (and continue to be) a whole host of reasons why. But as researchers, by trade, we zoned in on one glaring issue: there just isn't a lot of research exclusively on physically active women. And the research that exists tends to be narrow in focus (either by body part, type of injury, sport/activity, specific output, etc.) or worse compare women to men, with men as the standard. While the existing body of research on active women is incredibly important (and there's plenty to celebrate and amplify here), we know more needs to be done, because we still have a ton of questions!
Ultimately, we crave more knowledge about what it means to be an active woman throughout the lifespan, how to be active safely, how we can enhance the joy it brings, and ensure gender equity in sports and physical activities!
The founding members of the Active Women's Research Collective hold in combination backgrounds in physical health education, kinesiology, biology, public health, education, community transnational research, and the humanities (with focuses on gender equity, performance, sports, and more). But, probably more importantly, we're also active women and athletes who want to understand our bodies and experiences better, and who never want to stop enjoying movement!
Welcome to the Collective!
