The concept of Sport for Development (SfD) was developed in the late 20th century. In Japan, the discussion about the contribution of sports to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) began along with the planning for the Summer Olympics and Paralympics 2020 in Tokyo. This discussion is important considering the new role of sports in the post-COVID-19 society. Although it is said that sports can play various roles in the context of SfD, more rigorous verification is needed to understand the significance of sports at the societal, community, organizational, and individual levels. The involvement of women in international development has been growing in many sectors. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in 2015: “We cannot achieve our 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development without full and equal rights for half of the world’s population, in law and in practice.”However, the author has not previously paid attention to grasping SfD matters from gender perspectives, which may be related to the different meanings of gender bias (related to identity crisis) or the excessive attention to the other social minorities related to ethnicity, economic poverty, disaster victims or starvation. Although I have ignored my lack of attention to gender perspectives, at the same time, both in fi eld activities and in research, I have questioned why most of my colleagues were cheerful, confi dent, and male sports persons or male development workers. In the meantime, as my research progressed, I wondered about the necessity of “exposing some of the racialized, classed and gendered silences and invisibilities evident in SDP scholarship and practice” (Hayhurst et al., 2018). The thematic areas of “international development and gender”and “sports and gender” have received signifi cant attention in research during the past 20 years. However, looking back at the research on the sociology of sports, gender studies, and development studies, the inclusion of gender perspectives in SfD research is still uncommon. This study examines the conjunction of international development, sports, and gender by evaluating several related hypotheses, setting the Hayhurst (2018) discussion as a focal point, to clarify the vision for the upcoming analysis of fi eld data. Another focus is the inherent power of sports as a tool for development from a gender perspective.