Dr. Guylaine Demers has empowered generations of students, coaches, athletes and administrators to make sports a more safe, equitable and welcoming place. Formerly a high-performance basketball player and coach, Guylaine has become a driving force for gender equity in sport across Canada and around the world. Often working on a volunteer basis, she has served as Chair of the Gender Equity Task Force for the Sports Ministry of Canada, President of Égale Action, Québec’s Association for the Advancement of Women in Sport, and as an active member of the Canadian Olympic Committee’s sports inclusion task force. In 2015 Guylaine also founded the influential Conversation Women and Sport Conference, rekindling a nationwide campaign for gender equity in Canadian sport. Whether speaking to young athletes or reporting to federal ministers, she has been courageous and uncompromising in her efforts to shine a light on the experiences of athletes who face discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation.
 
Named a Woman of Influence by the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women in Sport (now called Canadian Women and Sport) in 2007, 2011, and 2014, as an accomplished researcher, educator, and activist Guylaine Demers has made the most of every opportunity to translate academic insight into real-world solutions. As a professor and Women’s Studies research chair at Laval University, she led the first project to map gender imbalance in sports across Québec, with input from different provincial sport organizations. In 2022 she founded Lab PROFEMS, the first research laboratory in Québec dedicated to advancing women in sport. As co-director of the National Research Centre on Gender Equity in Sport and an Affiliated Scholar with the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, Guylaine has continually created meaningful opportunities to share her research with a wider audience, hosting three seasons of the podcast Jouer Comme Une Fille. In addition to over two decades of dedicated involvement with the Coaching Association of Canada, she has also worked diligently to advance women in coaching while contributing to many leadership sessions, mentorship programs and to the Canadian Journal for Women in Coaching for over two decades.
 
A global catalyst for change, Guylaine Demers has left an indelible mark in many places where women’s access to sport has been historically limited. Assisting with the creation of a ground-breaking program to develop female coaches and administrators for the Qatar Women’s Sport Committee, Guylaine has also been called upon to testify on critical issues before the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Recognizing her far-reaching impact, in 2020 she received the International Olympic Committee’s Women and Sport Award for the Americas. Issuing an equally resonant challenge to homophobia and transphobia in sport, Guylaine was invited to give conferences on LGBTQIA+ athletes at the 2023 Gay Games in Mexico and to be part of an international experts group to guide the National Olympic Committee of the Netherlands on inclusion of trans women in high performance sport in conjunction with the 2024 International Skating Union World Short Track Speed Skating Championships. Fuelled by decades of dedicated advocacy and transformative scholarship, she continues to work tirelessly to advance her heartfelt vision of sport as a universal language that everyone should be able to access equally and experience safely.

Back to Member Index