Editorial: Engaging Women and Girls in Community Sport: Building an Equitable and Inclusive Future

Women and girls are traditionally underrepresented in community sport and have faced a multi-level and complex set of barriers to their participation and leadership. Many women and girls still face structural, cultural and social barriers and depending on their intersectional identity they may also face oppression and marginalization (LaVoi, 2016). Positively, there are increasingly more opportunities for women and girls to play and lead within community sport; especially in traditionally male-dominated sports. However there are still prevailing attitudes that women/girls are “second rate” compared to men/boys and there is discriminatory allocation and access to resources (Adams and Leavitt, 2018; Casey et al., 2019; Eime et al., 2021). Uncovering the narratives surrounding the various issues from a range of disciplinary perspectives, country contexts and sports can inform building an equitable and inclusive future to attract and retain women and girls in community sports. Likewise, supporting community sport to develop ideas, methods and solutions with stakeholders informs practice and policy, like the development of a theoretical blueprint for attracting and retaining girls' in Australian football (Elliott et al., 2020) and netball clubs' utilizing fun and enjoyment to promote inclusion, participation and retention (Litchfield and Elliott, 2020)...