Professor Kerry McGawley, menstrual health literacy

Women in Sport and Exercise Academic Network Podcast

Kerry McGawley is a professor in sports science at the Swedish Winter Sports Research Centre, part of Mid Sweden University. She is also the senior manager of the female athlete programme at Orreco (Fitrwoman). Kerry is passionate about supporting and developing women in sport and much of her research is conducted in collaboration with national and international sports organisations. In line with her research focus, Kerry leads a M.Sc. programme in Sports Performance and Athlete Health and she tutors on several high-performance sports coaching programmes. Kerry has published more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific articles and has written several book chapters. Outside of work, Kerry is a keen competitive triathlete and has won several World, European and National age-group championship titles.

Kerry can be found on X (Twitter) and Instagram under my name, @Kerry McGawley

https://www.instagram.com/kerrymcgawley/

https://x.com/kerrymcgawley

Topics covered:

• Improving menstrual health literacy (published paper): Six-stage recommendations for improving menstrual health literacy in sport
• Validation of a menstrual cycle knowledge questionnaire by PhD student, Katerina Fisher, with a large cohort of German athletes and coaches.
• PhD from Martina Höök on barriers to communication hindering female athletes and follow-up study (Höök et al. 2023) using Action Research with adolescent athletes and their coaches, to improve knowledge and communication around stigmatised health topics.
• Research/work on runners…A study comparing junior and senior female middle-distance runners.
• Current qual + quant data collection to investigate elite athlete menstrual cycle management strategies and hormonal cycle characteristics over repeated cycles.
• Advice: on accessing large cohorts, for early career researchers.
• Applied consultancy work with Orreco/Fitrwoman.