Women’s Sports Need Women’s Science
Women’s sports are growing faster than the evidence base built to support female athletes. Investment in women’s sport has to include the science behind the athletes themselves.
Written by
DAO Sports Association
Published
August 22, 2026
Women’s sports are growing. The research has to keep up.
On August 21, the Global Alliance for Female Athletes expanded from four member nations to nine. Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland joined Australia, the United States, Britain and New Zealand, while Ireland and Belgium joined as supporting partners.
The purpose is practical: accelerate research on female athlete health and performance, identify gaps, and move better evidence into the hands of athletes, coaches and clinicians.
That is not a side project to the growth of women’s sport. It is part of the infrastructure.
The evidence base is still uneven.
A 2025 systematic review examined 1,441 studies in three major sports and exercise medicine journals. Female participants represented 43.95 percent of the total participant pool, but only 7.15 percent of the studies were female-only, compared with 18.6 percent that were male-only. Menstrual status was considered in just 5.6 percent of study designs.
A separate 2026 review of research on exercise-induced cardiac adaptation found an even larger gap. Across 767 articles and 94,744 participants, women represented 24 percent of participants. Fifty-four percent of the studies used male-only cohorts; 5 percent were female-only.
That does not mean sports science knows nothing about women. It means important parts of the evidence remain thinner than they should be.
A research gap becomes a decision gap.
Research eventually becomes training guidance, injury-prevention programs, medical screening, return-to-play decisions, recovery protocols, equipment choices and coaching assumptions.
If the evidence does not adequately reflect the athletes being served, those decisions begin with less information than they should.
The answer is not to assume every difference requires different treatment. The answer is to study the question well enough that institutions do not have to guess.
A research gap eventually becomes a decision gap.
Build the institution around the athlete who is actually there.
Women’s professional sport should not be a smaller copy of a system originally built around male athletes. Research priorities, medical frameworks, performance data and long-term athlete care should reflect the people actually competing.
Blockchain cannot answer a sports-science question, and governance cannot turn weak evidence into strong evidence. What institutional design can do is make standards reviewable, evidence traceable, responsibility identifiable and policy capable of changing when better research arrives.
Inherited architecture is still architecture. If women’s sport is entering a new era, the knowledge supporting female athletes has to enter one too.
If women’s sports are worth building, female athletes are worth studying properly.
The next era of women’s sport should produce more than games. It should produce better knowledge about the athletes playing them.
Sources and reporting
- 1.Reuters, “Global initiative for female athletes expands to nine nations,” August 21, 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- 2.Ose et al., “Where Are All the Female Participants in Sports and Exercise Medicine Research? A Decade Later,” American Journal of Sports Medicine, 2025 (opens in a new tab)
- 3.Henley-Martin et al., “Female athlete representation in exercise-induced cardiac adaptation research,” American Journal of Physiology, 2026 (opens in a new tab)
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