Professional women’s sports, historically overlooked and undervalued, reflect the deep gender and racial inequalities that have molded American women’s experience for centuries.
In 2016, pay inequity within US women’s sports burst onto the public scene when the US women’s National Soccer Team launched a lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation. The equal pay complaint arose after players learned they were earning as little as 40 percent of what players on the men’s team were paid for the same number of games. Finally, in 2022, the Women’s National Soccer Team settled its equal pay lawsuit with the US Soccer Federation for $24 million, creating a groundbreaking precedent for gender pay equality in sports.
Since then, the fight for equity in sports has continued all over the world. And, premiere female athletes such as Allyson Felix, Simone Biles, Nneka Ogwumike, Naomi Osaka, Mary Cain, Tatyana McFadden, and Serena Williams have become outspoken supporters of women’s equality within and outside of athletics, advocating for maternal health, sexual safety, racial justice, and disability justice. Their groundbreaking advocacy has coincided with campaigns to combat inequality in athletics.
Internet Gender Bias. Gender inequity in sports is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it is even programmed into our search engines, which have been coded to prioritize men over women in their results. For example, browsers typically report that Christiano Ronaldo has scored the most goals in international soccer, when in reality, retired Canadian soccer player Christine Sinclair holds the record for most goals scored.
To change the male gender bias in internet browsers, in 2023 Team Heroine and DDB Aotearoa launched Correct the Internet, a campaign providing feedback to search engines to ensure the gender biases are corrected. As a result of this initiative, Google modified its search engine to make women’s sports more visible, expanding coverage of women’s competitions at the top of its results page, and improving its responses to queries.
Unequal Opportunities to Play Sports. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, young women in the United States have 1.3 million fewer opportunities to play high school sports than young men. Girls, particularly girls of color, face multiple barriers to sports participation, from difficulties with transportation to inferior equipment, facilities, and coaching.
Since 2016, worldwide, some sports organizations have formed programs to bridge the gender gap in sports participation, including Cricket Australia. In 2024, it launched a ten-year Women and Girls Action Plan to increase the presence of women and girls in cricket at the community level. Now, Girls comprise more than 25% of cricket players in Australia, up from 15% in previous years.
Racial Inequality. In recent years, non-profits have begun to address deep-rooted racial inequalities in women’s sports. In 2015, former Olympians Rebecca Soni and Caroline Burckle co-founded RISE to address racism, prejudice, diversity, and inclusion. It started by offering a mentoring service for female athletes wrestling with the emotional strain of managing their burgeoning careers, and today runs youth leadership programs, helps collegiate institutions assess their support of student athletes of color, and creates curricula for athletes and coaches to foster conversations about race and social justice in sports.
Starting in 2019, America’s largest online racial justice organization, Color of Change, founded in Oakland, California in 2005 to create a more human and less hostile world for Black people in America, began tackling racial and gender inequality in sports. After conducting a survey that uncovered the disparities faced by Black student athletes in high revenue generating sports like football, it has been celebrating the history of Black athletes’ activism in the United States, fighting for payment for collegiate women’s athletes, and calling on corporations to take concrete steps to support the female athletes of color they represent.
And, in 2020 when Sha’Carri Richardson, an American track and field sprinter, was suspended from the 2020 Tokyo games after testing positive for THC, one of the 113 chemical compounds in the cannabis plant, Color of Change actively supported her. It started a petition challenging Richardson’s suspension, and launched a campaign highlighting the ways in which anti-marijuana regulations, like those in Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, the regulation that determines the illegal substances athletes are prohibited from using while competing and dictates the penalties for doing so, have historically targeted people of color. While Color of Change’s campaign did not reinstate Richardson as a competitor in the 2020 Tokyo Games, it did spark a dialogue about racial discrimination in athletics and whether or not marijuana should be included among the drugs banned by athletic organizations’ anti-doping regulations.
Thanks to women athletes’ activism, the 2025 Paris Olympic Games became the first in history to achieve full gender parity on the field of play, with an equal number of quota places for male and female athletes, and a balanced schedule that showcased male and female events equally.
To support the dignity and respect of women athletes, this year the International Olympic Committee distributed guidelines to the media advising it to film women without emphasizing seductiveness, as they have in the past.
The 2026 Milan Olympics will be the most gender-balanced Olympic Winter Games in history, with women accounting for a record 47% of the athletes. Additionally, there will be four new events for women – ski mountaineering sprint, luge doubles, freestyle skiing dual moguls, and ski jumping large hill individual – bringing the total to a record number of 50 women’s events.
Despite recent advancements, women in sports – particularly women of color – continue to combat pay inequality, societal stigma, and antiquated rules and regulations.
To learn more about how critical equal pay in women’s sports and other professions is to women’s financial independence, watch Stand UP, Speak OUT: Equal Pay – Know Your Rights
