Fellowship received in 2005 – 2007
Current Affiliation: Chief Executive Officer, The Global Observatory (GO) for Gender Equality & Sport
Dr Payoshni Mitra is a former badminton player and coach turned gender and sport scholar, a prominent athlete rights advocate, and a leading campaigner in the abolition of sex testing policies in women’s sport. She has more than a decade-long experience of working closely with women athletes across Asia and Africa to enable them to address human rights violations in sports. Her advocacy work on inclusion and non-discrimination in sport has influenced important social, institutional, and structural changes on an international scale.
With her research and advocacy work, Dr Mitra has been able to help athletes win legal cases on complex gender issues on more than one occasion. She was instrumental in assisting Indian athlete Dutee Chand to regain her rights to compete in athletics and was one of the ten-member team who testified for South African Olympian Caster Semenya at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
She is a Director and Trustee at the Geneva-based Center for Sport & Human Rights and was appointed as the first-ever CEO of the newly established Global Observatory for Gender Equality & Sport in January 2022. The Global Observatory is supported by UNESCO and is incubated by the Swiss Confederation. It is headquartered in the Olympic Capital city of Lausanne.
