The high school gymnasium, with its polished floors and echoing cheers, has long stood as a citadel of American virtue—a place where young people learn discipline, teamwork, and the quiet dignity of fair play.
Yet beneath the buzzers and bleachers, a different lesson is being taught daily, one that has nothing to do with sportsmanship and everything to do with the casual, creeping contempt that our society still harbors for its female athletes.
The misogyny that once announced itself through separate facilities and unequal funding has not vanished; it has simply traded its overt uniform for a subtler camouflage, embedding itself in the language of the locker room, the algorithms of social media and the wage ledgers of professional franchises, where a woman’s jump shot still counts for considerably less than a man’s.
On July 22, 2025, the AXA Health research team, led by Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr. Pallavi Bradshaw, released a study that ought to have landed like a thunderclap but instead drifted into the news cycle with the muted acceptance of the already known.
Nearly half of all female athletes in the United Kingdom reported encountering misogynistic insults—”you throw like a girl,” “you look like a man,” “you’re not strong enough”—with 47% of those comments coming from men on the street, 44% from male athletes, and 36% from male coaches.
Fifty-eight percent of those subjected to such abuse said it made them consider quitting sport altogether, a statistic that speaks less to fragility and more to the cumulative weight of a thousand small cuts, each one delivered with a grin and a shrug and the insistence that it was only a joke.
The joke, however, lands with particular force in the digital arena, where the comment sections beneath female athletes’ social media posts have become something akin to public square pillories.
A remark that once might have been confined to a whispered aside between teammates now reaches hundreds or thousands of eyes, where it earns likes and laughter and the poisonous validation of collective approval. ‘Lockerroom talk’ is now broadcast on platforms, making it accessible to billions of people.
World Athletics documented the scope of this phenomenon in its cyberbullying report, finding that during the Tokyo 2020 Games, 63% of all online abuse was directed at just two female athletes.
At the 2022 World Athletics Championships, the figure was 59%. During the Paris 2024 Games, sexist or sexual abuse constituted nearly one-third of all detected harassment, with unfounded doping accusations—a particularly insidious weapon—targeted disproportionately at women.
The damage, however, does not confine itself to the digital realm.
It seeps into the very structure of the sport itself, manifesting in the wage disparities that have become so routine they barely register as injustice.
The Women’s National Basketball Association, whose players recently warmed up in shirts bearing the message “pay us what you owe us,” presents a case study in economic discrimination that would be almost comic if it were not so profoundly unjust.
The league’s revenue jumped from $102 million in 2019 to a range of $180 million to $200 million by 2023, with broadcast rights climbing from zero in 2002 to roughly $60 million annually, a figure projected to reach $200 million as part of a combined deal with the NBA.
Yet WNBA players receive less than 10% of league revenue, a figure so low it would be unsustainable in any other professional context. Meanwhile, Joe Lacob and Peter Guber, who own both the Golden State Valkyries and the Golden State Warriors, pay Stephen Curry nearly $60 million a year while reportedly paying the entire Valkyries roster barely $1 million combined.
The less a league makes, the lower the share its players receive—but the WNBA’s share remains strikingly, almost defiantly, low.
This is not merely a matter of professional sports. The rot sets in early, as girls as young as five years old absorb the cultural message that sport is not truly for them. A recent survey found that only 30% of parents believe playing sports is “very important” for their daughters, compared with 41% for their sons.
This disparity manifests in what researchers call the “team sport gap”—a 24% difference between girls and boys participating in organized athletics, a figure that represents not just lost games but lost opportunities for leadership, resilience, and the lifelong physical and mental health benefits that sport confers.
By the time they reach puberty, 1.3 million girls who once loved sports have disengaged, their enthusiasm quietly extinguished by a culture that has taught them their accomplishments matter less.
The leadership vacuum compounds the problem. A recent count of the top 20 sports in England by participation showed that across the roles of CEO, chair and performance director, just 26% were women.
Women remain a minority in coaching, particularly at the elite level, creating a self-perpetuating cycle in which young female athletes lack mentors who reflect their own experience and aspirations.
Jacqueline McDowell, assistant dean for faculty success at George Mason University and an associate professor of sport management, has documented how this cultural bias limits networking opportunities for women seeking advancement, sending a signal to young girls that the corner office—or the head coach’s chair—is not really meant for them.
Even the media, which might serve as a corrective, too often exacerbates the problem. In 2024, just 8% of sports coverage on key channels was devoted to women’s sports, despite the undeniable growth in women’s participation and audience interest.
When coverage does occur, it frequently veers toward sexualization, focusing on female athletes’ physical attributes rather than their athletic accomplishments, diverting attention from talent to a standard of beauty that has nothing to do with sport and everything to do with the commodification of women’s bodies.
There are, of course, countervailing forces. In January 2023, President Joe Biden signed the Equal Pay for Team USA Act, requiring that all U.S. athletes representing the nation in international amateur competitions receive equal compensation and benefits regardless of gender.
The measure covers 50 national sport governing bodies, including the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and ensures consistency in pay and benefits for medical care, travel and expense reimbursements.
The success of the Lionesses, the rise of women’s rugby in England and the fact that women earned nearly half of Great Britain’s medals at the Paris 2024 Games all testify to the progress that has been made.
But progress, as Dr. Bradshaw observed, is not the same as completion. “Despite the progress which has been made to improve access to women’s sport,” she stated, “the research shows there’s still a long way to go to making sport an equal playing field for all. Comments about physical ability or derogatory statements about gender have no place in sport or exercise.”
The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls has highlighted that globally, women face coercive control, physical violence, corporal punishment, social exclusion and identity abuse within sport—a litany of horrors that makes the casual sexism of a high school comment section seem, by comparison, merely a symptom of a much larger disease.
Yet symptoms matter. They matter because they reveal the underlying condition. When nearly half of female athletes are subjected to misogynistic abuse, when 58% consider quitting because of it, when a professional league generating $200 million in revenue pays its players less than 10% of what their male counterparts receive in similarly structured organizations, we are not witnessing isolated incidents.
We are witnessing a system that has absorbed misogyny into its very fabric, a system that tells women their athletic achievements are somehow less real, less valuable, less worthy of respect. That message is delivered not through overt policy but through the accumulated weight of a thousand daily indignities—the comment on a social media post, the joke in the locker room, the wage discrepancy that everyone knows about but no one seems able to fix.
High school sports were meant to teach respect, teamwork, and character. They were meant to be a place where excellence, regardless of who achieved it, received its due.
Instead, they have become a training ground for a different set of lessons: that women’s accomplishments can be dismissed, their bodies can be sexualized, their efforts can be underpaid, and their complaints can be ignored.
The glass ceiling in sports is not a single pane but a thousand tiny fractures, each one barely visible on its own but together forming a barrier that remains stubbornly, shamefully intact.
If a generation of young women is being shown every day that their achievements matter less, that their sports are less worthy, and that their success is somehow laughable, then we should not be surprised when those attitudes persist into adulthood, when they harden into policy, when they become the wage sheets and media coverage that continue to shortchange female athletes at every level of competition.
The solution requires more than legislation. It requires a fundamental shift in attitudes, a recognition that misogyny is not merely hatred but prejudice, malice and contempt—a determination to preserve male power and traditional gender roles through a thousand small acts of dismissal.
It requires anti-misogyny policies and training in every sports organization, 50-50 representation on boards and executive teams, and the recognition that male allies who challenge their own biases are not optional but essential. It requires the understanding that women are not a minority seeking inclusion but a majority demanding equality.
No one should be excluded from the joy, fulfillment and lifelong benefits of sport. Women and girls deserve equal opportunity to enjoy those benefits, not as a concession but as a right. The uncivil game continues to be played across America’s fields and courts and comment sections, but it can be changed. It must be changed. The question is whether we have the will to change it.
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