Gender limitations in women’s boxing sport

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PhD M.V. Aranson1
PhD, Associate Professor E.S. Ozolin1
PhD O.V. Tuponogova1
1Federal Scientific Center for Physical Culture and Sports, Moscow

Objective of the study was to theoretically analyze coverage of gender limitations in modern women’s boxing sport by the sports science.
Methods and structure of the study. We used, for the purposes of the study, some materials of the relevant Research Project Progress Report, and analyzed the gender limitations coverage by the research publications (scientific articles, abstracts, books and dissertations) in the Google Scholar database for the period of 2016-2020. We found and analyzed the relevant materials by a few keywords including “female”, “boxing”, “gender”. Of special interest were the studies with concern to the women's boxing training specifics, their socialization and self-awareness issues, gender equality, attitudes to women athletes and other relevant topics. We screened out of the database for analysis the women’s training issues as such since they will be covered by our upcoming study of the women’s training system improvement methods.
Results and conclusions. Having analyzed the mostly foreign study report on the issue, we found the key barriers for progress of the modern women’s boxing, including the self-identification disorders, gender inequality in progress opportunities; environmental pressure, prejudice and biased perceptions; and shortages of the women-needs-sensitive training and competitive models. We have demonstrated that, despite the large-scale and often politically biased contradictions in these issues, there are a few objective problems that need to be solved to facilitate progress of the women’s boxing sport – including the traditional conservatism of the sport management policies and multiple social prejudices against women athletes.

Keywords: women’s boxing (WB), research publications, gender limitations (GL)

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