Corporate governance in sport organizations: a gendered approach

To achieve the project's objectives, we organized 9 face-to-face transnational meetings in the 5 countries of the project, and 50 virtual meetings to discuss Intellectual Outputs (IOs), multiplier events (ME) and other activities regarding future work. Also, we conducted a face-to-face summer course and an online international conference to publicise the IOs results. We presented the results in 4 different international conferences in Italy, Portugal, Turkey and the UK. Other events were participation in the First Digital Seminar organized by the Higher Sports Council of Spain, in the webinar organized by the Basque School of Sport, a keynote talk about the project in the UK an organized event on Women in Sport Governance, and in an activity for Women’s Day in Italy to share the project information and results. During the first year, after building the website, we organized an international competition to select the project logo and to prepare the logo catalogue that was presented in an exhibition in the framework of the summer course. At the 2nd TM, the Press, Radio and Television Production Office of the Foundation of the University of Teramo made a promotional video of the project. Next, we collected in-depth data from the websites of all NSFs in 5 countries, built a database, wrote an e-book, and planned 2 articles with this data. In the second year, we prepared a questionnaire for the members of boards of NSFs and an interview form for the women in all NSFs, both in 5 languages. In 2019, we started to record video interviews high-ranking female members of NSFs’ boards of directors in Spain and Portugal. At the beginning of the third year, we conducted more interviews in Italy and Turkey. In the same year, we started to write two articles. However, we could not continue the interviews because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2021, we implemented the questionnaire and continued to record the video interviews in Spain and Turkey and published the conference proceedings e-book with the abstracts. Then, we selected the papers more closely related to the aim of the project and published them in an e-book. In 2022, we continued to implement the questionnaire and record the interviews in UK, submitted two articles to journals and published their pre-print versions. We presented the results of the survey at an international conference and shared the database built with the answers of the questionary on the website. Also, we update the 2018 database in 2022 to compare the evolution of women on the boards of the NSFs during these four years. We translated, edited, and subtitled the 520 video interviews and prepared 5 interview guides in the form of books into 5 languages. Lastly, we prepared a final report book in each language. All results were published as open access on the website and other platforms to increase the impact of the project (researchgate, Zenodo Open Data Repository and zaguan). The results of the interviews can help women who currently hold positions of responsibility in sports organizations to share their experiences and their vision on corporate governance. The project will benefit stakeholders involved in sport by allowing them to become aware of the limited presence of women in the process of making strategic decisions, especially politicians. All the initial aims have been achieved, given that the results provide useful information to other institutions interested in the topic of gender and how to improve good governance. To our knowledge, there has been no project that has interviewed and videotaped the most influential women in European sports federations, so the project has been innovative and has contributed to the knowledge of the practices of the individuals and NSFs involved.