New Era in Women’s Sports Fueled by Decades of Women Donors

Scout Bassett was 14 years old when she ran for the first time. Having lost her right leg as an infant, she spent her childhood largely sidelined from school sports until a specialized running prosthetic gifted from the Challenged Athletes Foundation changed everything.

A decade later, Bassett was sleeping on friends’ couches in San Diego — having quit her job to train full-time in track and field — when she received another life-changing gift: a $3,500 training grant from the Women’s Sports Foundation. A drop in the ocean of sports funding, but a lifeline for Bassett that propelled her to the top of her sport within a year, eventually leading to seven national titles in the 100m and a spot on the 2016 Paralympic team in Rio.

“I saw how a single grant took me from nowhere — totally unheard of, not on the map — to winning a national championship within a year,” said Bassett, who now leads her own fund for women athletes with disabilities. “It took me on a path I could never have dreamed of.”

The modest grant that jump-started Bassett’s career is part of a wave of support that has transformed women’s sports over the past five decades. Since Title IX’s enactment in 1972, female athletes, activists, and donors have fueled a slow-burning revolution in women’s sports, culminating in today’s record-breaking viewership and participation. Now, even as the field celebrates its historic milestones, a new generation of athletes and their supporters are stepping up to tackle the remaining obstacles to equality.

“When girls play, they lead, and leadership is critical for our women to be able to succeed on and off the court — on the field and in the boardroom,” said Danette Leighton, CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation, founded by tennis legend Billie Jean King in 1974. “The more we develop that for both men and women, the better we all are.”

Research shows that 94 percent of women executives in C-suite positions played sports, many having benefited from the passage of Title IX, the 1972 law mandating gender equality in federally funded education programs, including athletics.

With each decade, more girls and women have been able to participate more fully in sports, from youth leagues to elite competitions, becoming invested in progressing gender equity in athletics. By many measures, the fruits of this decades-long labor are visible today. Since Title IX’s enactment, girls’ participation in high school sports has increased by a staggering 1,057 percent, from about 300,000 in 1971-1972 to over 3.4 million in 2018-2019. At the collegiate level, women athletes comprised just 15 percent of NCAA athletes in 1972, rising to 44 percent by 2020-21.

“Fifty years is not that long — it takes time” to realize equity, said Leighton, but “for every generation, you’re seeing more and more interest in this space.”

A Surge in Support

In recent years, a steady stream of former athletes, sports buffs, and corporate philanthropies have poured unprecedented levels of donations and investment into women’s sports. In July, investor and philanthropist Michele Kang pledged $50 million to launch a new nonprofit focused on training methods for women athletes, plus another $4 million to support the 2024 Olympic medal-winning USA Women’s Rugby Sevens team.

At the Olympic games in Paris last month, track star Allyson Felix — who received $20 million to distribute as she sees fit from Melinda French Gates in May — launched the games’ first-ever on-site nursery for parent athletes, after having previously helped create a $200,000 child-care fund for women athletes.

Indeed, annual philanthropy directed toward women’s and girls’ sports and recreation surged by 85 percent between 2012 and 2019, reaching $439 million before temporarily dipping due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the latest year for which the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University has data. In comparison, donations to Division 1 football programs at U.S. colleges alone — just a slice of all funding for men’s sports — totaled over $2.3 billion in 2023.

The 2019 bump in women’s sports philanthropy coincided with a U.S. win in the FIFA Women’s World Cup, a tournament that captivated global audiences and propelled interest in women’s athletics at all levels, said Jacqueline Ackerman, interim director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute, who noted that such high-profile events often inspire support for local programs as well.

At the collegiate level, many women who came of age able to play because of Title IX have directed donations toward their alma maters, like Lisa Palmer, who attended the University of Virginia on a softball scholarship in the ‘80s and later endowed a scholarship and led funding of a $10 million softball stadium at the school. Several funders, like the Women’s Sports Foundation, and Women Win, the corporate philanthropy arms of companies like Nike and espnW, and an array of smaller-scale donors, have contributed to K-12 girls’ access to sports through nonprofits like Girls on the Run.

“Girls’ sports intersects with a lot of other issues that people care about, and if they can open their wallets a little bit more, or get out on the field and volunteer, get their time and energy to these causes, that’s the way to grow it,” Ackerman said.

Leveling the Playing Field

Experts say the women’s sports movement would not be where it is today without those investments and the decades of tireless advocacy that preceded them.

“There are generations of women and some men that have long fought for equity in sports — and it was a fight,” said Robin Harris, executive director of the Ivy League, the elite collegiate athletic conference, and board chair of the Women’s Sports Foundation. Those investments of time and resources have been crucial because “to provide opportunities, you need funding and research that helps support why participation in sports is so beneficial to everyone, and particularly girls and women,” she said.

Women’s Sports Foundation

The Women’s Sports Foundation, founded by Billie Jean King with a $5,000 prize check in 1974, has been at the forefront of the fight for gender equity in sports for five decades. Since its inception, the organization has distributed over $100 million to support girls’ access to sports, fund research and advocacy, and provide grants to individual athletes like Bassett.

Founded two years after Title IX’s passage, the organization was instrumental in ensuring the law’s enforcement amid legal challenges and pushback from the National Collegiate Athletics Association, said Harris: “The Women’s Sports Foundation really led the charge at the time to fight for equity.”

Since its inception, the organization has funded over 200 nonprofits serving girls in sports, awarded millions in small grants for athletes, offered support for women coaches, and continued its advocacy to make Title IX live up to its promises. The group, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, had assets nearing $10 million in 2022 and regularly partners with big brands like Delta Air Lines, espnW, Athleta, and Gatorade to underwrite its funding ventures.

In addition to growth in women’s athletic participation, media coverage of women’s sports has nearly tripled in five years, from 5.4 percent of all sports coverage in 2019 to 15 percent in 2023, according to a study by Wasserman Group, though men’s sports still get 85 percent of the air time. The for-profit sports industry has taken notice, too, with women’s sports projected to generate revenue that surpasses $1 billion globally for the first time in 2024 — a 300 percent increase from the industry’s evaluation in 2021, though still a puny fraction of the hundreds of billions generated by men’s sports annually.

“We’re having increased investment, increased sponsorship, increased viewership, and attendance, so all the metrics around interest in and respect for women’s sport are on the rise,” said Nicole Lavoi, director of the University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. In 1993, Dorothy Tucker, a banker’s daughter and clinical psychologist, donated $1 million to create the center, one of few research institutes focused on women’s athletics — at least for now.

In recent years, Lavoi has noted an uptick in donations from a new generation of supporters inspired by the growing profile of women’s sports.

“You’re seeing a wider variety of people giving now. Those of us who’ve always given to women’s sports felt a strong connection for doing so because the sport had impacted our own lives, maybe as athletes or coaches,” she said. “Now you see more people giving to women’s sport because of the visibility and media attention it’s getting.”

Underinvestment Remains

Despite improvements in recent years, only about 1.8 percent of all charitable giving overall goes to women’s and girls’ causes, with sports and recreation receiving an even smaller slice of that pie.

“We are thrilled with the movement that we have,” said Leighton. “But if you look at all of the stats, you can tell we have a long way to go across the entire ecosystem.”

A 2021 study by the National Women’s Law Center found that girls have 1.13 million fewer opportunities to play high school sports than boys. This underinvestment is particularly acute for women athletes with disabilities, who face compound barriers in access to equipment, training facilities, and competitive opportunities, said Bassett.

“We’re experiencing this tremendous momentum for women athletes, and rightfully so,” she said, but women and girls with disabilities still face particularly daunting odds when it comes to athletic grant and scholarship options and opportunities to play.

As Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Paralympics, Bassett, who won’t be competing in the Paralympics now underway in Paris, sees an opportunity to advance the cause. Serving on the athlete commission for LA28, she’s pushing for full accessibility not just for athletes, but for fans and attendees as well. It will be the first summer Paralympic Games hosted by the U.S. as we know the event today, marking a potential turning point for disability sports in America.

“If you can persevere and push yourself to show up in places where people think you don’t belong,” she said, “that, in itself, is a form of advocacy or resistance.”