The Missing Gender: Examining the Barriers to Women’s Participation in Sports in India
Debashree Das,
Patanjal Kumar,
Aasheesh Dixit and
Vivek Balyan
Business Perspectives and Research, 2025, vol. 13, issue 4, 575-594
Abstract:
The advent of modernity has changed the sports landscape of the world, wherein all barriers, especially gender discrimination, have been broken, with men and women competing shoulder to shoulder in the sports arena. However, the sports landscape in India is completely different, as all the major sports activities are dominated by men. The aim of this study is to classify and rank the barriers that deter women’s participation in sports in India. For achieving this objective, a multi-criteria decision-making technique of Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) and MICMAC analysis has been used for relative ranking and classification of barriers that lead to gender discrimination in sports in India. The study encapsulates significant barriers that hinder women from actively participating in sports in India. The findings of our study suggest that economic barriers, lack of sporting infrastructure and culture, lack of potential career opportunities, knowledge barriers, and socio-cultural barriers are vital reasons that have implications for limiting women’s participation in sports and society alike. From a policy perspective, the proposed model will help identify the key barriers that ought to be addressed to bridge the gap between men and women in the sports sector in India.
Keywords: ISM; gender discrimination; MICMAC; multi-criteria; sports; women participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/22785337221148557 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:busper:v:13:y:2025:i:4:p:575-594
DOI: 10.1177/22785337221148557
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Business Perspectives and Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().