The WiSEAN Podcast: Women’s Sport & Exercise Research

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These are the Women in Sport and Exercise Academic Network (WiSEAN) podcasts. The overall purpose of WiSEAN is to grow, strengthen and promote research on women in sport and exercise, with the ultimate goal of optimizing women’s athletic success and their participation. We, therefore, invite academics, researchers and practitioners from sport and exercise to join us for our podcast, so they can share their thoughts, activities, research and advice. linktr.ee/wisean

  1. 11h ago

    Fertility, Pregnancy and the Female Athlete: Closing the Knowledge Gap in Elite Sport with Alexandra Newman and Louise Johnson

    Two guests join us to look at how women’s health policy andcommercial investment meet in elite sport. Alex Newmanis an independent female athlete health consultant, co-author of UK Sport’s Pregnancy Guidance and a trustee of the Active Pregnancy Foundation. Louise Johnson is founder of the Fertility Futures Project and global CEO of FUSE, Omnicom’s sports and entertainment agency. Together they discuss the charity’s new research into fertility and elite sport. They cover why athletes stay quiet about family planning, what a safe return to performance should look like, and why fertility education has to start much earlier, for athletes and for everyone else. Key points Why athletes stay silent. Many athletes said they didn’t feel able to talk openly about wanting a family. They feared being dropped from selection, losing funding or losing sponsors. Louise noted that the same pressure exists in the corporate world, where people worry about missing out on promotion.Fertility has been a blind spot. Alex said preconception care wasn’t considered when the UK Sport Pregnancy Guidance was first written. It was added in the second edition, partly because of her own experience of egg freezing. Athletes clearly want education on fertility, planning a pregnancy and returning to sport after having a baby.Education is the foundation. At school we learn how not to get pregnant, but not how fertility actually works. Without that knowledge, nobody can make a real, informed choice. Both guests want the whole team around an athlete educated too: coaches, support staff, agents and family. The aim isn’t to turn them intoexperts, but to help them point athletes to the right support.Periods are a health signal. Painful periods and missing periods aren’t normal. Louise’s own seven-yearjourney with endometriosis and IVF shows the cost of not knowing. Awareness of RED-S (low energy availability) has improved a lot; losing your period used to be seen almost as a “badge of honour”.Support staff are overlooked. People working in Olympic and professional sport face the same pressure from the four-year cycle, plus medal targets that affect funding.Support is patchy and unequal. There are encouraging examples: Spain’s national women’s football team, thePFA’s partnership with CARE Fertility, Chelsea Women’s fertility partnership and the WTA protecting players’ rankings during maternity leave. But this support is mostly limited to well-funded teams. Lower leagues and smaller sports are left behind.What a safe return to performance looks like. It should be gradual and individual, with the athlete treated as a person, not “a cog in a machine”. Alex suggested at least12 months of protected funding and selection after an uncomplicated pregnancy. She also wants clear financial protection, access to specialists (including pelvic floor health and nutrition), time off for midwife appointments and antenatal classes, and practical help with breastfeeding, travel and childcare.Motherhood doesn’t make athletes worse. The mothers they interviewed said having children made them better athletes. Louise said the same is true of people returning to work from maternity leave.The commercial side. Brand conversations are still at an early stage. Some sponsors heavily invested in women’s sport, and agents for women footballers, are now asking for best practice so they can build protections into contracts.Egg freezing is not an insurance policy. Alex was firm that it shouldn’t be presented as a guaranteed way to have a baby after retiring.Change fertility from “having a baby” to “body literacy”. Fertility is about understanding your body andyour health. It’s a shared responsibility for men and women. The guests hope it will follow the path of menopause, which went from taboo to mainstream.The vision for the next 5–10 years. What’s next for Fertility Futures. How to get involved.

    Fertility, Pregnancy and the Female Athlete: Closing the Knowledge Gap in Elite Sport with Alexandra Newman and Louise Johnson

  2. Oct 16

    Jill Colangelo: Underfuelling, Overtraining and Mental Health

    In this episode, Britta Sorensen talks with Jill Colangelo,a researcher in sports psychiatry at the University of Bern and PhD candidate at St Mary's University, Twickenham. A former collegiate athlete, triathlete and ultramarathoner, Jill says she came to research through her own mistakes: overtraining, under fuelling, and training for the wrong reasons. They discuss why we know so little about the mental healtheffects of very high training volumes, and why amateur ultra-endurance athletes often train like elites without elite-level support. Jill explains the line between accidental under fuelling and eating disorders, why a missing period isnever "fine" for an athlete, and the long-term risks to bone, hear and brain health that many women don't know about. They also cover how social media romanticises "pain cave" culture, over-reliance on fitness trackers, and why men can miss warning signs that women's cycles make visible. Jill shares her current work on neurodiversity, cardiac riskin endurance athletes, and her hopes to research perimenopause and menopause in ultra-endurance women. Her closing advice: learn to fuel properly and always eat. Jill Colangelo is a researcher in Forensic Psychiatry with a focus on Sports Psychiatry at the University of Bern in Bern, Switzerland. She is also finishing PhD study at St. Mary's University-Twickenham, London and has over 25 peer-reviewed publishing credits. She is a former collegiate athlete, triathlete, and ultramarathoner who has been mentoring overtrained athletes for almost a decade. Her academic work has been featured in outlets like Slate, Men's Health Magazine, Triathlete Magazine, Ultra Running Magazine, The New York Times, and on multiple podcasts.

    Jill Colangelo: Underfuelling, Overtraining and Mental Health

  3. Sep 14

    Dr Trish Jackman: Flow Research Women in Sport and Beyond

    Dr Trish Jackman is Associate Professor in Sport and Exercise Psychology at the University of Lincoln. She is also the current Chair of the Psychology Division in the Chartered Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences (CASES). Trish is an active researcher, with some of her current projects focusing on healthy ageing and loneliness. Alongside her academic role, Trish is also a registered Sport and Exercise Psychologist and works with athletes, coaches, parents and support staff across a range of sports. Trish has a deep interest in women in sport research and practice. She is a member of the míde research consortium on the island of Ireland and led a scoping review of research about women in sport in Ireland, identifying key trends in the existing evidence base and offering recommendations for future research.      In this episode, Britta Sorensen speaks with Dr Trish Jackman, Associate Professor in Sport and Exercise Psychology at the University of Lincoln and Chair of the Psychology Division at CASES.  Trish traces her path from playing camogie in rural Waterford to an academic career built, more or less by chance, on a single undergraduate essay about optimal experience. That essay led her to the concept of flow, which became her master's dissertation, then her PhD at Lincoln, and eventually a body of work spanning two decades. She explains how her thinking on flow has changed over that time: away from a purely cognitive account of a single optimal state, toward something more embodied, more individual, and open to the idea that athletes can perform at their best even when the experience itself feels difficult.  The conversation ranges widely across her work. She describes building the Ageing and Physical Activity Network in Lincolnshire, a county whose rural geography and older-than-average population make physical activity a challenge worth taking seriously, and makes the case that enabling movement in later life is everyone's business rather than something confined to health and sport professionals. She discusses her research on the mental health of doctoral researchers, prompted partly by her own experience, and a large systematic review on loneliness in sport that found isolation can be produced by the culture and structure of a sporting environment rather than simply by being alone in it.  The second half turns to Ireland, where Trish is part of the MIDE Research consortium working to map and advance research on women and girls in sport across the island. She talks about the gap between what is published and what reaches coaches and communities, the cultural and linguistic context that shapes the work, and where she hopes it will be in five or ten years. The episode ends on running, which she took up after retiring from camogie and, on the reasoning that she was never going to be fast, began with an ultramarathon.    Links: https://www.lincoln.ac.uk/researchatlincoln/meetourexperts/trishjackman/  https://www.linkedin.com/in/trish-jackman-67456659/

    Dr Trish Jackman: Flow Research Women in Sport and Beyond

  4. Jun 30

    Dr Anke Samulowitz: Gender Norms, Pain and Bias in Healthcare and Sport

    Dr Anke Samulowitz is a physiotherapist and psychologist. She works as a quality improvement facilitator at the Centre for Equity in Health Care in Gothenburg, Sweden, combined with research at the University of Gothenburg. She defended her thesis on “Pain, gender norms and psychosocial resources” in 2023. Her research focuses on pain and gendernorms, stereotypical ideas about men and women; how they are and expected to behave. Gender norms can lead to gender biases, medically unmotivated differences made between men and women, hampering equity in health care. To combine research and quality improvement in health care is one of her central goals.   Themes: Anke's background combining physiotherapy, psychology and health equity researchThe shift from a biomedical to a biopsychosocial understanding of painHow gender norms shape the way pain is expressed, reported and assessedWomen portrayed as emotional and exaggerating pain; men as stoic and pain-tolerantMedia coverage of athlete injuries — heroism attributed to men, fragility to womenGender norms linking masculinity with sport/training and femininity with everyday exerciseWomen expected to self-manage pain; men expected to seek and receive treatmentGendered leisure patterns — women as "downsizers" in sport after family responsibilitiesGender bias in pain and assessment questionnaires (including eating disorder screening in athletes)Social support and chronic pain — emotional support more critical for men, practical support more critical for womenFuture research directions: contextual mechanisms of gender bias, social support in sport, and questionnaire validity

    Dr Anke Samulowitz: Gender Norms, Pain and Bias in Healthcare and Sport

  5. Jun 1

    Dr Simone Fullagar and Dr Adele Pavlidis

    Themes: How both researchers came to feminist sport sociology and began collaboratingWomen's recovery from depression — the link between movement, embodied experience and mental healthPara-sportswomen's experiences of gendered ableism, body shaming and being unheard by coachesMedicinal cannabis in sport and questioning the "spirit of sport"The Brisbane 2032 Olympics legacy project — engaging people currently outside sportBarriers to sport participation: belonging, body image, cost, identity and feeling unwelcomeCreative research methods — poetry and songwriting workshops with marginalised communitiesHockey program for Yazidi refugees in Toowoomba as a model for sport and trauma recoveryGender-based violence in sport — prevalence, under-reporting and institutional responsibilityAddressing the gender gap in disability sport (intersectionality of disability and gender)Queer fans and the Women's World Cup — invisible communities in legacy planningStrength and conditioning coaches' understanding of gender and its gapsRecommendations: intersectional approaches, diversifying leadership, questioning sport's normsand who they serve Dr Simone Fullagar (she/they) is Professor and Chair of the Sport and Gender Equity research hub at Griffith University, Australia. She has published feminist, interdisciplinary sociological research using (post)qualitative approaches across sport, leisure and mental health fields. Simone collaborates with colleagues on a number of ARC projects that address gender equity and diverse forms of embodied movement. Her most recently book is Pavlidis, A., Fullagar, S., & O'Brien, W. (2025). Feminist futures for sport: Tracing the affective dynamics of gender equity in sport organizations, Palgrave. Simone lives on the unceded lands of the Yugambeh and Kombumerri peoples of the Gold Coast. Dr Adele Pavlidis is an Associate Professor in Sociology with the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, and previously a DECRA Fellow (2018 to 2021). She is author of three books, Sport, Gender and Power: The Rise of Roller Derby (2016, Routledge, with Simone Fullagar), Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery (Palgrave, with Simone Fullagar and Wendy O'Brien) and Feminist Futures in Sport: Exploring the Affective Dynamics of Change in Australian Rules Football and Roller Derby (2025, Palgrave, with Simone Fullagar and Wendy O'Brien). She has published widely on a range of sociocultural issues in sport and leisure, with a focus on gender and power relations. Theoretically her work traverses contemporary scholarship on affect, power and organizations, and she is deeply interested in social, cultural and personal transformation and the entanglements between people, organizations, and wellbeing. She is currently Director of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Treasurer of the Australian Women's and Gender Studies Association, and Co-Chair of the Sportand Gender Equity (SAGE) research hub at Griffith University.

    Dr Simone Fullagar and Dr Adele Pavlidis

  6. Jun 1

    Dr Simone Fullager & Dr Adele Pavlidis: Feminist Research, Inclusion and the Future of Women's Sport

    Themes: How both researchers came to feminist sport sociology and began collaboratingWomen's recovery from depression — the link between movement, embodied experience and mental healthPara-sportswomen's experiences of gendered ableism, body shaming and being unheard by coachesMedicinal cannabis in sport and questioning the "spirit of sport"The Brisbane 2032 Olympics legacy project — engaging people currently outside sportBarriers to sport participation: belonging, body image, cost, identity and feeling unwelcomeCreative research methods — poetry and songwriting workshops with marginalised communitiesHockey program for Yazidi refugees in Toowoomba as a model for sport and trauma recoveryGender-based violence in sport — prevalence, under-reporting and institutional responsibilityAddressing the gender gap in disability sport (intersectionality of disability and gender)Queer fans and the Women's World Cup — invisible communities in legacy planningStrength and conditioning coaches' understanding of gender and its gapsRecommendations: intersectional approaches, diversifying leadership, questioning sport's normsand who they serve Dr Simone Fullagar (she/they) is Professor and Chair of the Sport and Gender Equity research hub at Griffith University, Australia. She has published feminist, interdisciplinary sociological research using (post)qualitative approaches across sport, leisure and mental health fields. Simone collaborates with colleagues on a number of ARC projects that address gender equity and diverse forms of embodied movement. Her most recently book is Pavlidis, A., Fullagar, S., & O'Brien, W. (2025). Feminist futures for sport: Tracing the affective dynamics of gender equity in sport organizations, Palgrave. Simone lives on the unceded lands of the Yugambeh and Kombumerri peoples of the Gold Coast. Dr Adele Pavlidis is an Associate Professor in Sociology with the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, and previously a DECRA Fellow (2018 to 2021). She is author of three books, Sport, Gender and Power: The Rise of Roller Derby (2016, Routledge, with Simone Fullagar), Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery (Palgrave, with Simone Fullagar and Wendy O'Brien) and Feminist Futures in Sport: Exploring the Affective Dynamics of Change in Australian Rules Football and Roller Derby (2025, Palgrave, with Simone Fullagar and Wendy O'Brien). She has published widely on a range of sociocultural issues in sport and leisure, with a focus on gender and power relations. Theoretically her work traverses contemporary scholarship on affect, power and organizations, and she is deeply interested in social, cultural and personal transformation and the entanglements between people, organizations, and wellbeing. She is currently Director of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Treasurer of the Australian Women's and Gender Studies Association, and Co-Chair of the Sportand Gender Equity (SAGE) research hub at Griffith University.

    Dr Simone Fullager & Dr Adele Pavlidis: Feminist Research, Inclusion and the Future of Women's Sport

  7. May 22

    Prof Holly Thorpe: Researching Women's Bodies, Sport and the Fight for Inclusion

    Holly Thorpe (she/her) is a Professor in the Sociology of Sport and Gender at the University of Waikato (New Zealand). She has published over 140 articles and chapters, and five books and nine co-edited books, including the Palgrave Handbook of Menstruation Studies in Sport (2026), Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness (2020), and Women in Action Sport Cultures (2016). She is co-editor of the Palgrave New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures series (with Kim Toffoletti, Aarti Ratna and Jessica Francombe-Webb). Driven to do research that has real world impact and concerned for issues of equity and inclusion, Holly works with an array of national and international sports organisations to build more inclusive sporting cultures.   New Handbook of Menstruation in Sport coming out soon,  The Palgrave Handbook of Menstruation Studies in Sport | Springer Nature Link   Themes discussed in the podcast: Holly's background in action sports and how it shaped her academic pathFemale athlete health, menstruation, and REDS (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport)The biopsychosocial approach to understanding women in sportInterdisciplinary collaboration — working across sociology, physiology, endocrinologyThe new Palgrave Handbook of Menstruation Studies in Sport (2026)Cultural and ethnic diversity in female athlete health researchWorking with sports organisations (High Performance Sport NZ, Sport NZ, IOC, Snow Sports NZ)Action sports, the Olympics, and expanding opportunities for women and girlsThe IOC's controversial return to mandatory sex testingThe slow pace of change and strategies for sustaining feminist sports research

    Prof Holly Thorpe: Researching Women's Bodies, Sport and the Fight for Inclusion

  8. May 13

    Dr Nicole M. LaVoi: Advancing Girls and Women in Sport through Research and Impact (audio)

    Audio: Dr Nicole M. LaVoi, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer of social and behavioural sciences in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Minnesota and the Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. Through action-orientated, collaborative research, she translates data and answers critical questions that can make a difference in the lives of girls and women. As a leading scholar on gender, leadership and women coaches, Dr LaVoi has published 100+ book chapters, research reports and peer-reviewed articles in top-rated journals. Her Outstanding Academic Title award-winning book ⁠⁠Women in Sports Coaching⁠⁠, the annual ⁠⁠Women in College Coaching Report Card™⁠⁠ and Emmy-nominated documentary ⁠⁠GAME ON: Women Can Coach⁠⁠ help inform countless stakeholders who change the system for women sport coaches. She is the founder of ⁠⁠Coaching HER®,⁠⁠ and co-creator of ⁠⁠BodyConfident Sport⁠⁠, free tools to upskill coaches to more effectively coach girls. As a public scholar, she hosts a podcast (Tucker Center Talks), consults with a variety ofstakeholder groups, works with industry partners, speaks around the world, fields media requests, provides thought leadership and serves on mission-driven advisory boards. She is a two-time NCAA Academic All-American and three-timeHall of Fame inductee. LaVoi is an award-winning athlete, coach, scholar and distinguished teacher, who won a regional Emmy for ⁠⁠Best Sport Documentary⁠⁠, and was named a 2023 USTA Champion of Equality her longstanding work in gender and sport. LaVoi played collegiate tennis at Gustavus Adolphus College winning a NCAA-III National Team Championship where she currently serves on the Board of Trustees. Prior to her career in higher education, she was a USPTA Teaching Pro and head tennis coach at Wellesley College. In her free time, she enjoys being outdoors, biking, hiking, golf, painting and soaking up the sun. Topics Tucker Center work: Description of the key messages, goals, activities. How people outside of the University can become involved. Competition with other research centres. Main activities within the center, e.g., coaching HER, Women in College Coaching Report Card. Whichmost proud of/which has had the greatest impactResearch: Research items and high citations – explanations. How the book, Women in Sports Coaching came about.Future directions, especially anything to change/left unturned, excited about.Insight into the content of the Spotlight Speaker session at the WiSEAN conference 2026.

    Dr Nicole M. LaVoi: Advancing Girls and Women in Sport through Research and Impact (audio)
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These are the Women in Sport and Exercise Academic Network (WiSEAN) podcasts. The overall purpose of WiSEAN is to grow, strengthen and promote research on women in sport and exercise, with the ultimate goal of optimizing women’s athletic success and their participation. We, therefore, invite academics, researchers and practitioners from sport and exercise to join us for our podcast, so they can share their thoughts, activities, research and advice. linktr.ee/wisean

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