Pushing Boundaries: Women in Sport and Exercise Conference, St Mary’s University, Twickenham, June 11–12, 2019

The Women in Sport and Exercise Academic Network (WiSEAN) was established in 2016 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. The impetus for establishing WiSEAN came from the dearth of female-specific research in sport, and in sports medicine in particular (Costello, Bieuzen, & Bleakley, 2014). This lack of research likely reflects trends where females are often underrepresented in research publications and in other domains, such as science-based subjects (Burton, 2015; Ceci & Williams, 2011; Krishnamurthy, Liao, Deveaux, & Dalecki, 2017; Pape, 2019; Shor, van de Rijt, Miltsov, Kulkarni, & Skiena, 2015). It was felt that organizing a network, where individuals could collaborate, mentor, support, and disseminate their work on the female sports person or participant, could go somewayinaddressing these sex and gender inequalities. Aninaugural meeting of WiSEAN was held on September 14, 2016, with one of the agreed outcomes being to hold a regular conference for the purpose of disseminating cutting-edge research associated with all aspects of the exercising female. The first annual Women in Sport and Exercise (WISE) conference, Blood, Sweat, and Fears, was held in the United Kingdom at Staffordshire University in 2018 (Roberts & Forsyth, 2019). In addition to the annual conference, the network enables academics and researchers to communicate and collaborate with each other, to provide a platform for promoting research, and to support members via a mentoring scheme for those who want to develop their research skills in a relevant field. Membership of WiSEAN is open to all individuals over the age of 18 who support the WiSEAN aims. As of the end of 2019, the network has 276 members internationally. Further details of WiSEAN’s work can be found on the website: https://www.wisean.net/.