Women’s professional sports are having a record-breaking run. Revenue is up, viewership is up, and new leagues keep launching. But beneath those headlines, millions of girls ages 8 to 18 are navigating a different reality — one shaped by cost, belonging, coaching, and whether they can even name an athlete who looks like them.
The Women’s Sports Foundation’s inaugural WSF Sport Report 2026 set out to connect those two worlds. It draws on two original research initiatives: a nationally representative YouGov survey of more than 6k Americans-comprised of 3,065 children ages 8–18 and their parents- and a separate survey of 60 senior leaders across the women’s sports industry, paired with a separate survey of 60 senior leaders across the women’s sports industry. Together, they trace the full pipeline — from a girl’s first opportunity to play through collegiate, professional, Olympic, and Paralympic competition.
Here’s what the research found.
Yes — and the data is consistent across income levels, race, and age. Among girls who have never played organized sports, 54% say they want to. For boys in the same situation, it’s 52%. The interest is essentially equal. The gap is in who actually gets to play.
Currently, 45% of girls ages 8 to 18 participate in organized sports, compared with 52% of boys. That gap shows up as early as ages 8 to 10 — before puberty, before competitive pathways narrow — and it never closes. Girls don’t fall behind boys because they lose interest. They fall behind because they face more barriers getting in.
39% of girls ages 8 to 18 have never participated in organized sports — a larger share than boys at every age group. Among girls who have never played, 58% say they wish there were more opportunities, and that wish is even stronger among girls of color: 61% of Hispanic girls and 58% of Black girls who have never played say they want to.
The participation divide also runs sharply along income lines. 31% of girls from lower-income households currently play sports, compared with 58% of girls from higher-income households. That 27-point income gap is nearly four times the size of the overall gender gap between girls and boys.
The overall gender gap in sports participation — 45% of girls vs. 52% of boys — doesn’t capture how unequal access actually is across race and income. When you look inside the data, the disparities are significantly larger.
46% of Black girls and 47% of Hispanic girls have never played any sport, compared with 33% of white girls. Current participation rates follow the same pattern: 50% of white girls currently play, compared with 40% of Hispanic girls and 39% of Black girls.
The interest is there. Among girls who have never played, 61% of Hispanic girls and 58% of Black girls say they want to — higher than the overall rate. The barriers are structural: cost, access to programs, and the availability of schools and communities that invest in girls’ sports. Lower-income girls are also the least likely to know their rights under Title IX, with awareness at just 13% among girls in the lowest-income households. The girls facing the greatest barriers are also the least protected by the systems designed to help them.
The most common reason girls give for quitting is the same as boys: it stopped being fun (41% for both). After that, their experiences diverge significantly.
Girls are more likely than boys to say they left because they didn’t feel good enough, their friends stopped playing, they didn’t like their coach, or their body changed. Boys are more likely to cite logistical reasons, like getting to practice. Girls’ exits look social. Boys’ exits look logistical.
Girls are more than twice as likely as boys to say a changing body was a reason they stopped playing (11% vs. 5%). That’s not a puberty problem on its own — it points to sports environments that aren’t built to support girls through adolescence.
One of the sharper findings involves the youngest girls surveyed. Among girls ages 8 to 10 who quit sports, 15% named their coach as a reason — three times the rate of boys that age. What happens in those early years, and who is coaching, matters more than many people assume.
Yes, and the gap is larger than most families expect. The median annual spend on sports participation is $500 for girls, compared with $400 for boys — a 25% difference. More than one in three parents of girls who play spends $1,000 or more per year.
For lower-income families, cost functions less like a barrier and more like a wall. Among girls from households earning under $50,000 who have never played sports, 21% cite cost as the reason — more than twice the rate of higher-income girls. Their parents are even more direct: 24% of lower-income parents say cost is the main reason their daughter has never played at all.
At age 8, yes — overwhelmingly. At ages 8 to 10, 80% of both girls and boys say sports are “for someone like me.” But that number drops much faster for girls. By ages 14 to 18, 66% of girls still feel that sense of belonging in sports, compared to 73% of boys. Girls lose their sense of belonging in sports at more than twice the rate of boys across adolescence.
By high school, roughly one in three girls does not feel that sports are for someone like her.
That has consequences beyond participation. Among girls who currently play, 54% of 8 to 10-year-olds dream of becoming a professional athlete. By the teen years, that falls to 38%. Among boys the same age, the drop is smaller: from 71% to 58%. The gap in dreaming of a future in sports is 20 points by high school — during one of the biggest growth periods women’s professional sports has ever seen.
Not as consistently as the professional boom might suggest. 45% of girls ages 8 to 18 cannot name a single favorite professional athlete — of any gender. For boys, that figure is 29%.
When boys do name a favorite, just 2% name a woman. Among girls, 23% name a woman athlete as their favorite. The most frequently named is Caitlin Clark, at 5%. Serena Williams and Simone Biles each come in at 3%.
The visibility gap also varies by income. Among girls from households under $50,000, 14% name a woman athlete as their favorite, compared with 27% of girls from households over $100,000. The girls facing the greatest barriers to participation are also the least likely to see themselves reflected in the athletes they admire.
The visibility of women’s sports is genuinely growing. The connection between that visibility and the girls it’s meant to inspire is still catching up.
Most don’t. 79% of girls ages 8 to 18 say they have never heard of Title IX. Just 3% say they know a lot about it. Even among high school girls — one of the groups the law most directly protects — awareness reaches only 26%.
The gap is wider among the girls who face the greatest barriers. Title IX awareness is 17% among Black girls and 13% among girls from the lowest-income households, compared to 30% among girls from the highest-income households. 55% of parents say they’ve never heard of it either.
This matters right now: 47% of senior leaders across the women’s sports industry identified Title IX rollbacks or weakened enforcement as the single greatest threat to continued progress for girls and women in sports. The girls the law is supposed to protect are largely unaware it exists.
By almost every measure, fast. American audiences spent 28.6 billion minutes watching women’s sports in just the first half of 2026 — up 18% from the same period in 2025. More than half the U.S. population now actively follows women’s sports.
The WSF expert panel reflects that momentum directly: 93% of industry leaders say progress toward gender equality in professional women’s sports improved over the past year, by far the strongest assessment of any level examined. Women’s professional team sports now span nine sports, 15 leagues, and more than 120 team rosters — most of them launched in the last four years.
But the experts are careful about what that momentum means. Compensation and pay remain the most frequently cited barrier at the professional level (30%), followed by cultural attitudes and bias (26%), and insufficient broadcast deals (19%). The growth is real. The work is not finished.
The House v. NCAA settlement — which allows colleges to share revenue directly with athletes for the first time — is reshaping college sports. Whether women are sharing equally in that transformation is an open question, and the expert panel’s answer is cautious.
College is the only level in the survey where more experts say conditions for women got worse over the past year than better: 37% say declined, 35% say improved. 40% say the barrier they identified is getting worse, compared to just 16% who say it’s improving.
On the settlement itself, fewer than one in ten experts familiar with it call it effective for women, and nearly half call it outright ineffective. The concern expressed in open-ended responses is specific: NIL earnings and revenue-sharing dollars are flowing disproportionately to men’s programs, deepening the resource gap rather than closing it. In 2024-25, men received $534 million more in athletic scholarships than women.
Nearly four in ten experts identify unequal resource allocation or NIL disparities as the single greatest barrier facing women college athletes today. Title IX enforcement is what they’d prioritize fixing: 37% of experts name it as the policy that would have the greatest positive impact if strengthened — more than double the next response.
College develops many of the athletes, coaches, and leaders who go on to shape professional and Olympic competition. If that level erodes, the effects don’t stay there.
Fewer than most people would expect, particularly given how much money is now moving through college athletics.
Women hold just 25% of all head coaching positions across all three NCAA divisions. Even for women’s teams specifically — where you might expect women coaches to be the norm — men hold the majority: women make up 41% of head coaches for women’s NCAA teams, meaning nearly six in ten women’s programs are led by men. Only 8% of head coaching positions for women’s teams are held by women of color.
The athletic director pipeline tells a similar story. Women hold 26% of athletic director positions across all three NCAA divisions, and just 5% of those are women of color.
The leadership gap matters beyond representation. Coaches and athletic directors shape hiring decisions, resource allocation, and what gets modeled as possible for the next generation. When women are largely absent from those roles, the effects compound throughout the system.
According to the WSF expert panel, not adequately at any level. The same 60 senior leaders who assessed major sports policies also rated the support systems women athletes rely on across professional, collegiate, elite, Olympic, and Paralympic sport. The verdict across all seven systems: not one earns a passing grade.
Year-round financial support outside competition windows is the lowest-rated: just 6% of experts familiar with it call it effective, while 51% call it outright ineffective. Online harassment protocols are nearly as poorly rated — 4% effective, 45% ineffective. Post-career transition support scores 9% effective. Pregnancy and postpartum leave with pay, which affects athletes across all levels, is rated effective by just 16% of experts.
When asked to name the single most urgent athlete protection gap not receiving adequate attention, online harassment is the most frequently cited response — named more than any other issue, including financial support. Beyond formal protections, experts repeatedly flagged gaps in reproductive health, hormonal health, and menstrual health as areas where existing frameworks fall short and formal systems don’t yet exist.
Safe sport enforcement is the highest-rated protection on the list, at 27% effective. That’s still far from a passing grade.
On the podium, American women are carrying the flag. Milano Cortina 2026 marked the sixth consecutive Olympic Games — summer and winter — where U.S. women won more gold medals and more total medals than U.S. men. American women took home 67% of U.S. gold and 61% of all U.S. medals at Milano Cortina.
The infrastructure behind that performance tells a different story. Women made up 47% of Olympic athletes at Milano Cortina — up from 45% in Beijing, but still short of parity. And just 50 of 116 medal events were women’s events. Nordic combined remained the only Olympic Winter sport with no women’s competition at all.
The coaching gap is even starker. Not one woman served as head coach of a U.S. Olympic or Paralympic sport or team at Milano Cortina. Among the full U.S. coaching staff, men outnumbered women more than four to one.
The expert panel’s assessment of the elite and Olympic level reflects a level that is making progress, but not fast enough. Only 22% of experts say conditions for elite women athletes are improving, while 45% say they’re staying the same. The most commonly named barrier — cited by two in three experts — is inadequate year-round financial support outside competition windows. Too many athletes competing at the highest level are still piecing together income from multiple sources between events.
LA28 is two years away. American women will almost certainly lead the U.S. medal count again. The question the research raises is whether the systems supporting them will have caught up by then.
According to the WSF expert panel, brands and media hold more power to drive growth than the institutions that govern women’s sports. Experts most often point to sponsors and corporate brands (29%) as the single greatest force that could accelerate women’s sports, followed by media companies and broadcasters (23%). Governing bodies and policymakers rank far lower.
That finding cuts both ways. The momentum women’s sports has built was driven by investment and visibility — not by policy or institutional mandate. But it also means the gains rest on decisions made in boardrooms and broadcast deals, not on structural protections that hold regardless of market conditions. The same companies that can drive the biggest gains are also the ones whose retreat would do the most damage.
The professional boom is proof of what’s possible when investment and opportunity align. Whether that momentum reaches the girls at the bottom of the pipeline depends on what happens at every level in between — and on who decides to act.
