focusing on women athletes “inspiring little girls” is sexist

This post was originally published in 2024. I’m republishing—with slight updates—it after attending the Boston Fleet game at TD Garden last night.

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If you’re new to women’s sports, you may be noticing how concerned the coverage and marketing of these leagues are with the next generation of players, the “little girls” who are watching and being inspired by their favorite athletes. When these leagues were first selling out arenas, I could maybe understand (and forgive) this focus. But as we are several years into the proof that women’s sports can sell out arena, this narrative is beginning to feel shallow and deeply sexist.

The tension between how women’s sports are being covered and how they perhaps should be covered bubbled over in last night’s post-game press conference following the Boston Fleet/Montréal Victoire matchup at TD Garden. The game had been played in front of a sold out crowd, a huge milestone for the Fleet and definitely a huge moment for the players. The game was also a matchup between the two best teams in the PWHL, with perhaps the two best goalies in the world.

The first three questions for Fleet players Megan Keller and Aerin Frankel were variations on the same question:

I want to be clear that I think a question about what playing in front of this crowd meant to these players is totally appropriate. Nor is this meant to be a callout of any media member specifically. I don’t think the achievement of a Garden sellout should be ignored, or the bigness of the moment should go unacknowledged. But I think it’s telling that media (or content creators) who come to these big games for soundbites and inspirational clips are dominating the narrative storytelling about women’s sports as a whole. That isn’t totally their fault, because this framing has been pushed by the leagues themselves, in ways that I think do a disservice to the athletes on the ice (or field or pitch).

This kind of inspiration porny coverage is so focused on the future of the game and the players who will come next that it almost seems to forget that there are players here now, currently, and also that there were players here before the present ones. It asks these athletes to pontificate on how they can help other girls live out their dreams in some hypothetical future rather than highlighting that the players are actually living out their own dreams in the here and now.

Not only that, it reinforces the cultural idea that what women do only has value if it’s in service of the next generation, or that it’s their job to nurture children in all areas of their lives.

The PWHL leaned in hard to this kind of messaging in its inaugural season, making it almost the entire focus of the league’s public image. The women of the PWHL exist so that you know you can do this one day, too! How inspiring! There is a Barbie partnership, and also a Wegovy partnership, so girls know they can be anything they want to be (except fat, of course).

We saw lots of this at the 2024 WNBA Draft (also known as the Caitlin Clark Draft), as well. “No shade (also shade though) but the number of times the draftees were asked what their ‘message for young girls is’ or ‘how does it feel to inspire a younger generation’ last night was really something,” Flagrant Magazine said on X.

Most recently, the new Women’s Professional Baseball League’s draft has had a ton of that messaging. It started with the draft back in November. In a mid-draft video from Jean Fruth of See Her, Be Her, Fruth congratulates the players being drafted, while adding, “I know you’re not just doing this for yourself, but for the little girls watching at home.” In interviews over the last six months, number one draft pick Kelsie Whitmore has talked about “the power of little girls seeing girls like her on a baseball field.”

It extends to all pockets of women’s sports, too, not just the professional realm. For National Girls and Women in Sport Day one year, Ole Miss Athletics launched their “Do It For Her” campaign, which included “a meet and greet with all of its women's teams and youth in the community to promote what the next generation can aspire to achieve,” according to a press release. Meanwhile, Tufts University spent a National Girls and Women in Sport Day “empowering the next generation of female athletes.” And on and on it goes.

Ironically, the Victorian-era arguments for keeping women out of sports were just the other side of this same coin: there was worry that vigorous physical activity, like athletics, would damage women’s reproductive organs and risk their ability to bear children. Essentially, the reason women should not participate sports was in service to the next generation, as well, to ensure they could have them and raise them.

Women are tasked with nurturing children and society reinforces the idea that their lives should be dedicated to that job—whether by not participating in sports so they can birth them or by playing sports so they can inspire them, whether they stay at home to raise them or enter the workforce to provide for them. Everything they do has to be in service of the next generation, in a way we do not ask of men. It’s why there is so much stigma against women who are not mothers, especially those who are childfree by choice.

We let male athletes aspire to athletic greatness and achievement simply for the glory of it or for the joy of it. When do women get to have the ambition for themselves, to play sports simply because they want to? When do we stop asking them to “do it for her [insert photo of little girl in the stands]” and let them do it for themselves, simply because they want to be great, to push themselves to their limits, and to achieve something?

“Sometimes I think we want little girls to dream but we don’t really want women to realize them,” Cassidy Lichtman, the Director of Volleyball at Athletes Unlimited, said on X in 2024. “Because the underlying, internalized notion is that women shouldn’t really have ambition, shouldn’t seek out the spotlight, shouldn’t put themselves first. And so even as we achieve greatness our greatness is measured by how we serve others.”

As women’s leagues have tried to build audiences, the focus on games being “family-friendly” existed in a way that men’s leagues never required. In the 1970s, the teams of the National Women’s Football League hoped that marketing themselves as “family entertainment” would help them tap into fanbases that perhaps avoided going to games for the local men’s teams.

“The college football game atmosphere [at Ohio State University] was often filled with unruly male fans spewing obscenities, alcohol and raucous crowds,” Lyndsey D’Arcangelo and I wrote at Sports Illustrated, in a story excerpted in part from our book, Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League. “At a [Columbus] Pacesetters game, many women and children joined their male family members in filling the stands to cheer on their friends, sisters, mothers and local athletic heroes.

“But billing themselves as ‘family-friendly’ meant that there was a part of themselves they had to keep under wraps: Many of the women who played for the Pacesetters were gay. They frequented Columbus lesbian bars like Summit Station and Mel’s, and a lot of players discovered the team through word-of-mouth there. In cities like Dallas, the local women’s bars bought ad space in the game programs of their NWFL team—the Shamrocks. The Pacesetters felt that wasn’t an option for them.”

In 2009, the WNBA’s Washington Mystics came under fire for their reasoning for not including a Kiss Cam feature at games. “We got a lot of kids here,” managing partner Sheila Johnson told Washington Post columnist Mike Wise at the time. “We just don’t find it appropriate.”

Now, of course, Pride Games are a huge part of WNBA culture—as well as most other pro women’s leagues, including the NWSL and PWHL. But even those are often framed as representation mattering for the little queer girls out there who can see people like them on the field. And while representation is important, Pride games are about more than providing inspiration for the fans. Pride games are also about queer athletes reclaiming the court or the ice or the pitch, about rightfully taking up visible space in the leagues that they have always been a part of and helped to build. Women’s sports culture is and always has been queer and Pride games are as much about asserting that fact as they are about vague gestures towards “inclusivity” and limp claims that “love is love.”

Back at TD Garden, during last night’s post-game presser, other members of the media attempted to directly challenge the narrative that was being spun. “A lot of the time we’ve seen in women’s sports that there is talk about the attendance numbers and who’s coming out to support women’s sports rather than the actual game itself, the actual strategy,” Jane Guay of The Daily Free Press asked Fleet coach Kris Sparre. “As a coach, what kind of balance do you want to see moving forward as that starts to become the norm?”

Sparre, who has never coached women before being hired to lead the Fleet, has probably never had to think about this issue before. His answer reflected that. “I think in any professional sporting event, the goal is to sell it out,” he said. “I’m not sure what you mean by balance, but I think it was nice to see that.”

Later in the press conference, another media member tried again, this time with Frankel and Keller. “Obviously, this was a historic game,” Laura Everett of Boston Women’s Sports began, “but I wonder for you all, how much do you want to talk about the history and the vibes of being at a sellout, and how much do you want to talk about game strategy?”

I thought Keller’s answer did a great job of straddling the line between respecting the fact that people still want to talk about attendance and acknowledging that she is actually a pro hockey player. “For us, this is the first professional women's hockey game that's been played here so it is historic, and it's a big moment,” she said. “I think for us, looking down the line, hopefully it's not the last, and that's when you can focus on hockey a bit.”

That answer segued perfectly into a question about the hockey from Emma Healy with the Boston Globe, for a nice moment to bring the conversation back to the on-ice product and performance. This Fleet team will be heading to the playoffs soon. They will face more close games from teams like the Victoire. Their job is to figure out how to try to beat those teams because they are paid to play hockey, not simply to be inspirational figures.

Women being able to claim something simply because they want it should be enough. They should be entitled to that right but we live in a culture that fears women’s desire, stifles it, asks them to shroud that desire in other things like building the game for the next generation or becoming an inspirational narrative in the making of “herstory.”

Let women want things. Let women achieve things. Watching women be successful for self-fulfilling reasons is perhaps even more inspirational to the little girls who are watching at home—it teaches them that they, too, can take ownership of their own lives and follow their own desire, creating a life that values what they can do for themselves and not just for what they provide for others.