The Gender Leadership Taskforce

The World Athletics Gender Leadership Taskforce was established with a remit to provide oversight of the gender leadership strategy to mainstream equity and ensure sustainable leadership pathways for women. Its main focus areas are building the pipeline of talented and empowered female administrators, coaches and technical officials, and driving gender leadership programmes to ensure the 50:50 gender targets for the World Athletics Council are met by 2027. 

World Athletics Gender Leadership Taskforce Chairperson Stephanie Hightower said: "I am delighted with the work that the Gender Leadership Taskforce is achieving in terms of working towards gender parity within athletics. Over the course of the last year, we facilitated a number of workshops, seminars and eLearning opportunities – all aimed at educating and empowering women to seek leadership positions within our sport. 

"Our research shows that while we are seeing notable improvements in the number of women involved in athletics, there is still work to be done to increase representation across all areas of the sport. We will continue to measure our success and implement new initiatives to ensure that we reach our targets within the committed timeframes."

The work of the Taskforce will continue in 2022 with the introduction of a number of new initiatives including:

• Putting greater focus on improving age, gender and area parity among coaches and technical officials
• Hosting a Gender Leadership Conference at the World Athletics Championships Oregon22
• Launching a dedicated LinkedIn page
• Developing a 'Train the Trainer' course for the Gender Leadership Seminar Course
• The establishment of a Mentoring Programme