An extensive literature base has investigated women’s underrepresentation in decision-making positions with sport organizations, yet women’s access to these positions remains limited. Diversification strategies, based on distributive justice, have failed to create further opportunities. A new approach is needed to address this latent issue. The concept of gender allyship is presented to address the limitations of distributive justice paradigms that involves men and women to work as members of a coalition to improve gender equity in sport organizations. Utilizing grounded theory, this paper presents the core category of awareness and related subcategories self-awareness, organizational awareness, and industry awareness, as a means of informing the performance of gender allyship. The findings provide interesting theoretical and empirical implications for understanding the development of awareness, its subcategories, and how it contributes to change.

大量文献调查了女性在体育组织决策职位中代表性不足的情况，但女性获得这些职位的机会仍然有限。基于分配正义的多元化战略未能创造更多机会。需要一种新方法来解决这个潜在问题。性别联盟概念的提出是为了解决分配正义范式的局限性，该范式涉及男性和女性作为联盟成员，以改善体育组织中的性别平等。本文利用扎根理论，提出了意识的核心类别以及相关的子类别自我意识、组织意识和行业意识，作为告知性别盟友绩效的一种手段。这些发现为理解意识的发展、其子类别以及它如何促进变革提供了有趣的理论和实证意义。