Where Are All the Women in Sports Science Research?

Piecing together the bigger picture on the gender data gap in sports and exercise science research

In 2018, my editor at Outside asked me if I would be interested in doing a story on how so much scientific research, especially related to performance, excludes women. Why does this happen and are we making any progress on that front?

I said yes because of course I would say yes.

That one email crystallized a couple of different strands of thought I didn’t even realize were related. I knew that women were under-represented in biomedical research and how it’s led to things like women being misdiagnosed or under diagnosed for heart disease because their symptoms are different from those experienced by men. Or how certain prescription drugs pose greater health risks for women because dosing is based on men.

But I hadn’t really thought about what it meant in terms of athlete health performance even though, over the years, sports scientists and exercise physiologists had casually mentioned the gender data gap in research in interviews with me.

When I first started to dig into it, there was one paper that everyone referred to—the Costello paper. Published in 2014, Joe Costello looked at articles published between 2011 and 2013 by three major journals—Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, British Journal of Sports Medicine, and American Journal of Sports Medicine—and found that women made up 39 percent of research participants.

Then, in 2016, Science News published an article by

Bethany Brookshire

. Brookshire ran her own data science experiment, looking at studies published in the first five months of 2015 in two exercise physiology journals. But she didn’t just look at the breakdown between participants who were women and men. She also segmented the data to see the kind of studies that women were included in. She found that women made up a much smaller share of participants in studies on performance and sports injury while making up a much bigger share of studies on disease and metabolism.

But that was it. When I started reported Up to Speed, I didn’t come across other papers that looked at the data gap beyond 2015. To be honest, I was a little worried that my information was dated.

Then in 2021 year, Emma Cowley, Alyssa Olenick, Kelly McNulty, and Emma Ross published a paper titled, “Invisible Sportswomen”: The Sex Data Gap in Sports and Exercise Science Research. Kelly McNulty, who’s currently a visiting fellow at Northumbria University, told me that they wanted to know if the research gap had closed since the Costello paper. Given the increased interest in women’s sports and female-specific data, they thought that it might have gotten better.

But what they found was that things hadn’t improved at all.

Out of over 5,200 publications published in six sport and exercise science journals between 2014 and 2020, only 6 percent focused on women exclusively. Out of over 12 million study participants, only 34 percent were women.

(I have to admit, I was a little stressed when I first heard about the paper. I was in the thick of writing my book. While this paper presented the updated information I was looking for, it also meant that I had to go back and revise my draft. But it was worth it.)

While they could have stopped there, the team had more questions.

“We wanted to dig a little deeper to understand why this sex data gap had occurred because to reduce the gap, it’s important that we understand where the bias originates,” McNulty says.

Since then, the team has published two additional papers with a third on the way.

In “Invisible Sportswomen 2.0,” published in 2023, the team (which now includes Sam Moore from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) examined the relationship between author gender, editorial board gender, and research quality. “Is it that women authors and editors are more likely to conduct and publish research on women participants and explore topics related to sex and gender, with the opposite being true for male authors and editors? How does it influence the quality of female-specific research?” McNulty says.

It turns out that while a greater proportion of women were first authors on studies related to women (those responsible for the bulk of the work), more men were senior authors (the person in a more senior role). The discrepancy suggests that there’s a leaky pipeline, that women are leaving before reaching senior academic positions.

Earlier this year, the team published an editorial, which they’ve dubbed “Invisible Sportswomen 2.5.” It looks at the representation of study participants who are women in midlife and beyond. McNulty was finishing a postdoc and looking for research on women in perimenopause and found very few papers. But, being the researcher that she is, she wanted to see what the data said.

The team went back to their data from the first Invisible Sportswomen paper, updated it, and examined it for representation of women in midlife and beyond. What they found was that women in this age group account for only 9 percent to total participants and only 16 percent of female-specific studies focused on this age cohort.

“Essentially, what it showed was that whilst the ‘typical 70-kg male’ is commonly considered the default body for studies in sport and exercise science, if we shift the focus to female-only studies, it appears that naturally menstruating females between the ages of 18 and 40 have been considered an adequate proxy to represent all females across sport and exercise science research,“ McNulty says.

And there’s an Invisible Sportswomen 3.0 paper in the works. They’re taking a closer look at the leaky pipeline in academia to understand the challenges women face in reaching more senior academic positions and the potential implicit biases here. What helps and what hinders women’s progression?

What I love about these papers is how, together, they piece together different pieces of the research data gap to give us a broader view of what’s going on—what are the challenges, barriers, and driving factors. It also helps us understand who still is or isn’t being left out.

It’s only by understanding these factors that we can figure out what the data—and lack of data—actually means and what we can do to ensure better representation in our research studies.

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Links & Things

• How to End a Love Story: I really need people to go out and read this debut novel from Yulin Kuang, which came out last week. I was lucky to read an advanced copy and it left me with the biggest book hangover, so much so that I immediately flipped back to page one and read it again. It’s a romance with big, big feelings and a broken, messy, and complex relationship that feels impossible for these two to end up together. Just a warning: the book does include grief, suicide loss, death of a sibling. Kuang is also adapting two of Emily Henry’s books for the big screen—People We Meet on Vacation and Beach Read (which she’s also directing).

• People finally realizing the huge disparities between WNBA and NBA salaries. Thanks, Caitlin Clark.

• Frankie de la Cretaz
  on women’s media finally embracing women’s sports coverage. About freaking time. Also, you should subscribe to Frankie’s newsletter because they have such great takes on sports, culture, and gender and their weekend rant and recommended reads are so good.

And two book-related things!

• The Bright Side podcast: This is a new daily podcast from Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. I got to join hosts Danielle Robay and Simone Boyce to talk about how we can support girls and women in sports. I really loved this conversation and it’s one of my favorites.

• Health Storytelling Author Q&A with Maryn McKenna and Christine Yu: This event was part of the Spring 2024 Health Storytelling Author Q&A series by the Emory Center for the Study of Human Health. I got to chat with fellow journalist Maryn McKenna about Up to Speed.

Thanks for being here. More soon.

Christine