Female athletes and the fight for fairness

Katie Ledecky competes in a preliminary heat of the Women's 1500m freestyle at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Swimming Trials in Indianapolis, Indiana on June 18, 2024. (Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images)

In May, less than a month after the WNBA draft, No. 1 pick Caitlin Clark and her Indiana Fever teammates traveled to Dallas for a preseason game. Not long after their commercial flight landed, the players were photographed and videotaped walking past an airport baggage carousel. The images quickly went viral and reignited criticism of yet another disparity between the treatment of professional male and female basketball players. (NBA teams have enjoyed private flights for decades.) One week later, after public questioning of the league’s priorities, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced that a “full charter program” would go into effect “as soon as practical” during the current season.

The upgrade was long overdue. Throughout the WNBA’s history, players have struggled with flight delays, cancellations, and layovers. (Six years ago, such problems led to the first forfeit in league history.) In recent years, WNBA players have also faced harassment in airports. This has all raised serious concerns about their health and safety. Beyond their travel accommodations, WNBA players deal with many other disparities and forms of discrimination. Some of the most entrenched include less pay, less media coverage, and, generally, less respect for their talent and level of play.

Long overdue also describes an upcoming Olympic milestone. When the Paris Games begin later this month, they will be the first Olympics to feature an equal number of male and female athletes. For decades, Olympic officials kept certain sports – ski jumping, for instance – and certain events, such as long-distance races in track and the 1500-meter freestyle in swimming, off the women’s program. It took years of public pressure and lawsuits to push the Olympic movement forward.

For far too long, control over women’s sports rested with (mostly male) team owners, executives, broadcast partners, federation presidents, and tournament organizers. These officials typically treated women’s sports more like charities than businesses. Predictable results followed: disparities in pay, prize money, facilities, support staff, travel accommodations, media coverage, and development opportunities.

Now, at long last – spurred by protests, lawsuits, boycotts, and viral videos – power is shifting at the elite level of women’s sports. This ongoing transformation is giving female athletes more influence and more control over their sports, their careers, their stories, and their bodies. It is amplifying their voices, democratizing and dispersing leadership, and encouraging growth and investment. (Deloitte predicts that women’s sports will generate $1.28 billion in global revenue this year, a 300% increase from three years ago.) Female athletes are finally being valued more, paid more, and supported more.

Given all these changes, it’s important to understand what sparked the power shift. It’s also critical to examine how we can sustain these developments. After all, a lot still needs to change – culturally, structurally, and systemically. Women’s sports have entered a new era, and that demands more attention, not less, be paid to the question of who has the power to shape the future.

Leveraging success

To understand what it’s taken to accomplish some of these changes and how the power shift gained momentum, it helps to consider two relatively recent and widely followed protests by two U.S. national teams. In different ways, the episodes reveal the discrimination, disrespect, and dismissiveness that female athletes have long endured and often still do. The stories also show how players can force change.

In March 2016, five star players on the U.S. women’s national soccer team filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that the U.S. Soccer Federation discriminated by paying female players less than male national team players. Then, a year later, the U.S. women’s national hockey team threatened to boycott the World Championships on similar grounds, calling for “fair wages and equitable support.”

With these moves, the two teams updated and improved the playbook for how female athletes can demand equity and drive change. The most critical element in each case was the involvement of high-profile elite players (both actions involved some of the best players in the world). What stars say and do quickly draws attention far beyond their sport and compels the powers that be to engage.

The governing bodies involved – U.S. Soccer and USA Hockey – fought back aggressively. But they underestimated the way star power would influence public sentiment. Much like Billie Jean King and her campaign for equal prize money in tennis prior to the 1973 U.S. Open, the country’s top soccer and hockey players knew they could leverage their status and their success. As its fight for equal pay stretched on, the U.S. women’s soccer team became the face of an issue that went far beyond sports – especially when U.S. Soccer argued in court filings that “indisputable science” proved that female players were inferior to male players. The subsequent outcry was predictable: Players, sponsors, and the public reacted with outrage, and U.S. Soccer President Carlos Cordeiro was forced to resign. Finally, in September 2022 – after six years of fighting – the women’s team signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave them equal pay.

The U.S. women’s hockey team wanted equal pay and more. Rallying under the social media slogan #BeBoldForChange, the players demanded the same kind of marketing, training, and travel support the men’s national team received, as well as better development opportunities for girls. Three days before the 2017 World Championships began, the women’s team reached a historic deal with the sport’s governing federation that included significantly higher pay and the creation of an advisory group to work on marketing, fundraising, and youth programming.

An image from Sedona Prince's TikTok documenting the women's weight room at the 2021 NCAA tournament.

Sports leaders have long expected female athletes to keep quiet and be grateful for whatever they received.

To fully appreciate the significance of these victories, it helps to have some historical perspective. Sports leaders have long expected female athletes to be grateful for whatever they received and to keep quiet about poor treatment, poor pay, poor facilities, and poor coverage. Many female athletes worried that speaking out would limit their opportunities, put their careers at risk, and harm their fledging professional leagues.

The way the soccer and hockey national teams confronted their federations, however, showed that they were ready to move on from “be grateful” to “be bold,” and to question standard operating procedures and practices. They had done their research. They had the receipts that highlighted the gender inequity baked into their sports’ business models. And their actions inspired and emboldened female athletes at all levels to use their own experiences and knowledge to lead and hold accountable the powers that be.

The effect across women’s sports was dramatic. One memorable example: In 2021, Sedona Prince, a forward with the University of Oregon, released a TikTok video documenting the almost comical disparity between the weight rooms provided to women and men at that year’s NCAA basketball tournaments. The video, which went viral, ridiculed the inequity. It also disproved the NCAA’s claim that the difference was simply due to a lack of space. Looking straight at the camera, Prince signed off with this message: “If you aren’t upset about this problem, then you’re a part of it.” Significant changes in women’s college basketball soon followed. First, the women’s tournament site got a proper weight room. The NCAA then commissioned an investigation that led to millions of dollars more being spent on the women’s tournament, as well as long overdue March Madness branding for the event.

Taking control

Later in 2021, a crisis in women’s professional soccer showed the growing confidence, boldness, and savvy in how female athletes were making the case for change. As revelations about player abuse and toxic team cultures rocked the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), superstar Alex Morgan posted a series of tweets. The tweets juxtaposed an official statement from then-NWSL Commissioner Lisa Baird with a pair of emails – one from a midfielder named Sinead Farrelly and one from Baird herself.

In a statement dated Sept. 30, 2021, Baird said that she was “shocked and disgusted” to read about new allegations of sexual coercion that had been made against Paul Riley, the former head coach of the North Carolina Courage. But the emails tweeted out by Morgan told a very different story. On April 28 of that year, Farrelly had written to Baird to report “extremely inappropriate conduct” by Riley, pointing out that she had first complained about the coach’s behavior six years earlier and asking what steps the league planned to take to protect players. On May 5, Baird responded to Farrelly that she could “confirm that the initial complaint was investigated to conclusion” and wished the midfielder the best.

Nothing came of that supposed investigation. But the fallout from what Morgan tweeted was swift: Baird resigned a day later. By taking control of the narrative, Morgan demonstrated what can happen when female athletes speak up thoughtfully and strategically. She also started a chain reaction. In the months that followed, player-driven, player-focused change swept through the league. Less than a week after Baird resigned, the NWSL Players Association (NWSLPA) issued eight demands aimed at giving players a say in the scope of upcoming investigations and in the selection of the next commissioner. The league quickly agreed to all of the conditions. On Jan. 31, 2022, the NWSL and NWSLPA announced that they had agreed to the league’s first collective bargaining agreement. The agreement ensured players would get higher salaries and more benefits. It also gave players more control of their careers through free agency.

Even before the collective bargaining agreement was signed, the NWSL’s power dynamics were changing. The league, for example, shifted the time and location of the 2021 championship game “at the request of the players” – a move that illustrated how the league emerged from the scandal led by its players and its executives, sometimes in that order. And the players made sure that their priorities would become everyone’s priorities.

A clear through line connects Prince’s TikTok video to Morgan’s tweets – and to the earlier stands by the U.S. women’s soccer and hockey teams. All of these episodes dramatized the poor treatment of female athletes with particularly compelling evidence. All used social media platforms to provoke a conversation and hold leaders accountable. All crafted concise narratives that immediately connected with the public on a large scale. All set in motion change that transformed their sports.

Jenni Hermoso celebrates scoring for Spain during the UEFA Women's EURO Qualifier match in Burgos, Spain on April 09, 2024. (Photo by Juan Manuel Serrano Arce/Getty Images)

Sustaining the shift

Last summer, the hashtag #ContigoJenni went viral on social media. Spanish for “With you, Jenni,” the hashtag was a rallying cry in support of Jenni Hermoso, the all-time leading scorer on Spain’s women’s national team. During the 2023 World Cup medal ceremony, Hermoso was aggressively kissed by Luis Rubiales, then president of Spain’s soccer federation. In the aftermath of the incident, Rubiales claimed that the kiss was “spontaneous, mutual, euphoric, and consensual.” Hermoso disagreed. The resulting uproar drew international attention to the abuses of power and cultural problems in Spanish soccer. It also prompted Spain’s national women’s team to follow a now-familiar path. After winning their first World Cup title, the players used their new fame to demand reform, refusing to compete again until the federation’s leadership changed. Rubiales soon resigned, other senior federation officials were dismissed, and a new coach was appointed for the team. The boycott ended when the Spanish government intervened and helped craft an agreement that called for changes to the structure of women’s soccer in the country. The agreement made further professionalization of the national team and its staff a priority and created a committee comprised of players, federation members, and government representatives to track the reforms.

A through line exists here, too, from the U.S. soccer and hockey players given seats at the tables where decisions get made to the Spanish committee. More current and former athletes need to be officially invited into the leadership ranks and involved in shaping the future of women’s sports. That is the next stage in the power shift.

As that transition occurs, players will no doubt continue to raise their voices to protest gender inequity.  Thanks to the attention paid to Caitlin Clark expect more debate and more in-depth conversations about WNBA pay. (It’s a multi-faceted issue in which sexism, league finances, and media-rights deals all play a significant role.) Players must also ensure that greater involvement in leadership committees and advisory groups is not driven by optics alone. It must be motivated by a genuine desire to hear from athletes and learn from their experiences. It must start with the recognition that the decision-making power in women’s sports no longer rests exclusively with owners or executives, and that leadership and power can come in many forms and from many sources.

We also need more vigilance over how sports leaders exercise power, especially given the extent to which female athletes have been abused in the near and distant past. And no group is better positioned to provide that vigilance than current and former players.

Next, we should exercise more care when deciding who will occupy official and unofficial leadership positions in women’s sports. More money, more ambition, and more attention will mean more opportunities for women but also more pressure and more tough choices. Leaders should not blindly pursue revenue as the only goal. There are still many entrenched disparities that need to be addressed.

Yes, female athletes enjoy more power today than ever before. But they and their legions of supporters and sports leaders must use their power wisely and boldly to create more much-needed change.