Sometimes, winning a gold medal in an elite global competition just isn’t enough to convince people that you’re deserving of your success – especially if you’re a woman.
That’s at least true for the USA’s gold-medal-winning Women’s Ice Hockey team, who faced being the butt of a poor-taste joke made by President Trump when he called to congratulate the Men’s team on their unexpected gold medal win against the Canadian favourites.
Not only had the Women’s team secured their own gold medal a few days before the Men (and, funnily enough, did not receive a Presidential congratulations afterwards), but they have been consistently more successful than the Men’s team since Women’s Ice Hockey was first introduced to the Winter Olympics in 1998, medalling in every single competition. Not only does their medal count exceed the Men’s but they’ve also accomplished their success in far less time. And yet, their accomplishments have received far less fanfare.
The women in the USA’s Olympic team, across every sport, incidentally, have won more medals this year than their fellow male teammates. Unfortunately, it’s not just within Women’s Hockey, or indeed Team USA where women’s significant accomplishments are continually undervalued by men.
A few days prior, team China skier Eileen Gu, made headlines not for her own impressive medal haul (one gold and two Silver) from the Games, but because she chose to clap back at a male journalist who had the gall to ask her if her silver medals were in fact lost golds, the emphasis being on her perceived shortcomings rather than her unrivalled success.
Aside of being one of the most decorated female Olympians in existence, Eileen is also student of quantum physics at Stanford University, and a model – having featured on the cover of Vogue Hong Kong and China’s In Style magazine. And all this at the age of 22. Hardly an underachiever.
And yet, despite this multitude of successes, women continue to be undervalued in professional sport. A recent report by McKinsey highlights just how damaging this gender-based oversight is, not only for the female athletes, but for the sports industry itself.
The report notes that whilst revenue from women’s sport in the US grew 4.5 times faster than that of men’s sports between 2022 and 2024, the sector is far from reaching its full potential, identifying a $2.5bn missed opportunity for stakeholders – particularly marketers and sponsors.
A lack of recognition hinders progress
Whilst male athletes at the top of their games can routinely rake in six-figure sums from sponsors, leaving them free to focus all their time and energy on training, female stars find such opportunities thinner on the ground. It’s not uncommon for elite female sports stars to be working a “day-job” while nurturing their sporting dreams. A further report from FIFpro, exploring women’s football, found that two thirds of professional female players juggled second jobs alongside training.
A good (if depressing) example can be found in the Lionesses – England’s Women’s Football Team, which won the Euros tournament last summer for the second time in a row. After their historic back-to-back win, an article published by Sportbible revealed that players Beth Mead, during her early years playing in England’s top division, had also worked in a bakery, a restaurant, a factory and in retail, and that Lucy Bronze had needed to take on additional work at a bar and at Domino’s during her time playing for premiership teams Everton and Liverpool. The Men’s team, which has failed to win a World Cup since 1966, and have never won the Euros, can at least console themselves with the knowledge that they don’t have to take on a 6-hour shift in Tesco after training wraps up for the day.
Such bleak realities make the talent, dedication and accomplishments of female athletes all the more impressive, but things still need to change. So how can we fix the sporting world to take female professionals seriously and support them sufficiently in reaching their potential?
Unfortunately, it’s not just the sports industry that needs to go back to the playbook.
Women can win with the right support
Just as the sporting world shows that talented women can drive success and revenue, the same realities are found in business when women occupy the boardroom.
Research from Durham University Business School revealed that, with a woman at the helm, companies are far less likely to find themselves in the red, as they are more debt-averse in comparison to than men holding the same position. The study took in nearly 30 years of data from S&P 1500 companies and revealed a pattern of female CEOs making safer, surer spending choices and investments.
A further study from NEOMA Business School revealed that having more women on the board can boost overall company performance, by positively influencing areas like efficiency and less risky decision making. But the researchers pointed out that companies in countries with better gender equality were found to benefit most, due to women’s better access to education and professional opportunity.
Such results cannot be reduced to assumptions that women play it safe and sensible. Research from Vienna University of Economics (WU) revealed that female leaders are making significant progress in newly-important areas like sustainability. The study identified that having a higher number of women in upper management boosted a company’s willingness to engage in more sustainable practices. Not only that, they secured success in these areas under a much higher level of scrutiny from stakeholders than male leaders received – an assurance of quality and capability as well as progress.
However, all too often, female participation at the top levels of industry is still reduced to box-ticking, quotas and maintaining favourable public images (as Trump joked to the Hocket bros) rather than any real drive to grow female talent.
McKinsey’s annual Women in the Workplace reports reveal that, when women can access the same career support as men, they can accomplish the same ends. But despite efforts to bring more women into professional roles and improve representation at entry level, the C-suite gender gap between men and women has widened from 6% in 2023 to 15% in 2025. So, though more women are being supported to enter organisations, fewer are reaching the top.
The most recent reports from the World Economic Forum confirm that progress is achingly slow. In fact, as highlighted by Forbes, it will take more than 100 years before the world achieves full gender parity according to the WEF’s projections.
What needs to happen to for female talent to finally be taken seriously and nurtured appropriately?
Are mentors enough?
When it comes to female progression (or indeed the support of any underrepresented group in the workplace) by instilling a diverse range of senior level professionals within the top ranks of an organisation, many companies aim to inspire and encourage others to follow the same path. After all, you cannot be what you cannot see. Mentors are often championed as one of the most effective routes to bring talent up through the ranks, especially for women who, according to research from ESMT Berlin, are far better at making relationships in the workplace than men.
But relying on a mentorship model alone to boost such progression can bring a new set of complications. Research led by faculty at INSEAD identifies that the presence of high-achieving women can unintentionally undermine an organisation’s willingness to fix its gender problem.
The study examined how people perceived organisational diversity, finding that when participants were shown organisations led by female CEOs, they consistently overestimated the gender diversity of the firm’s broader leadership, even if the data told the opposite story. The presence of one highly visible, counter-stereotypically successful woman at the top was enough to impact the perception of how other women existed throughout the organisation.
The more counter-stereotypical the success (i.e. the more surprising it was to see a woman in that role) the greater the perception of high diversity was.
Whilst visibility is indeed important, the INSEAD study found that inflated diversity perceptions reduced participants’ willingness to support future diversity-enhancing policies, and even their willingness to hire a woman for an open role in future, producing the exact opposite response to any diversity agenda behind a high profile appointment. Organisations that rely on a small number of high-profile women to signal diversity are not only likely to fail to accomplish their goals, they’ll make the problem worse.
Why Organisations Must Embrace Sponsorship
Beyond role models and mentors, the concept of sponsorship (though different from the financial support offered in the sporting world) offers professionals a more actionable step up.
According to Professor Herminia Ibarra of London Business School, sponsorship is the process by which senior people use their personal clout to talk up, advocate for, and place a more junior person into a key role. The difference between sponsorship and mentorship? A sponsor does not primarily talk to their sponsee, they talk about them, to others in high places, and in rooms where the sponsee often isn’t able to be present.
This, the research shows, can open a significant number of doors.
Professor Ibarra’s research, as published by Harvard Business Review, identifies four core actions of effective sponsorship that can make all the difference when building a pipeline for talent progression; amplifying a sponsee’s achievements to decision-makers, boosting them into high-visibility projects, connecting them to influential figures they wouldn’t otherwise reach, and defending them against bias in performance and promotion conversations.
Each one of these actions affords the sponsee the ability to stop fighting to simply tread water, gaining the mental space to begin further honing their skills proposition. If professionals aren’t expending energy trying to pick the lock to get in the room where it happens, they can focus better on refining the right skills to display when the door is opened for them from the other side.
A further study led by Professor Stefan Gröschl at ESSEC Business School draws a clear definition between the two support systems; mentoring provides psychosocial support and cultural navigation in professional circles, while sponsorship offers proactive help to advance a person’s career.
The problem with gender bias
In line with Professor Ibarra’s findings, Professor Grösch states that sponsors are crucial for female leaders’ career advancement but indicates that gender bias presents an undeniable hurdle to ensuring this support is provided. Because senior leadership remains predominantly male, senior executives naturally and often unconsciously sponsor other men. Women in male-dominated environments, his study shows, rarely benefit from sponsorship at senior levels.
Work by Professor Marissa King at the Yale School of Management finds the same inequality at play. One in five men in the workplace has a sponsor, but only one in eight women do.
So the same frustrations exist. In tackling the ever-present gender barrier that halts all female professional progress in its tracks, it has been suggested that the problem is not women’s’ to solve alone.
Men in leadership are, by the nature of the problem, disproportionately positioned to be the most impactful sponsors for a female professional to have, and can go a long way into providing greater sponsorship opportunity to level the playing field.
Being more plentiful in number and more influential in the c-suite (and particularly in male-dominated sectors) male sponsors can provide an avenue and an endorsement to not only bring female professionals into the discussion but to also help to erode those long-held assumptions that business is a man’s world.
And, as with the benefits that female leaders can bring to an organisation in general, research from the Centre for Creative Leadership finds that sponsors themselves can benefit from the relationships they build with sponsees; from extending their own networks, to accessing organisational intelligence quicker (their sponsee on the ground acting in a reverse mentorship capacity), and become more effective leaders as a result. Not only that, but as sponsees go on to prove their worth more widely, the sponsor’s judgement is better sought and trusted in senior circles.
So what can be taken from all of this? Firstly, female professionals are worth far more than their medal tallies show and that, by failing to recognise this, organisations will continue to not only hinder female professional development, but their own success too.
Perhaps the Men’s Hockey Team might have considered a training session or two from the women’s team… after all, it’s hard to argue with the cold hard facts – the women did it first and have continued to do it better.
At the very least they might have then learned not to laugh along when misogynistic digs are made at their colleagues’ expense. Changing the narrative around women’s professional progression cannot happen if the discussions are also kept within gendered boundaries. Men need to become a more active part in enabling talented female colleagues to accomplish their professional goals by becoming more aware of the challenges they face, and championing their accomplishments.
After all, that’s what teamwork is all about.
By, Kerry Ruffle
Interested in this topic? You might also like this…