The US women’s national soccer team has won numerous international championships, but they are currently facing a gender discrimination lawsuit for equal pay (above, a picture of them from August 2019). Their governing body, US Soccer, has stated in court documents that they are less skilled than their male counterparts in advance of the trial. But the problem isn’t just that the gender pay gap also exists in sport — even the average woman just wanting to have enough energy to hit the gym regularly is at a disadvantage. The underlying research that makes good nutrition and effective training possible has also all been done on men, says exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist Stacy Sims in her TEDxTauranga Talk. “[During my early research I was told] ‘women are an anomaly, so we don’t necessarily study women in sport nutrition or exercise science’… I looked around and I thought surely with 50 percent or more of the population being female, aren’t the men the anomaly and they don’t know it yet?”
New Zealand-based Sims is on a mission to get the sporting world to recognize that “women aren’t just small men” but have their own set of nutritional and physiological needs.
While everyone’s body is different, there are patterns in physiology that are particular to most women and deeply impact their training. The monthly menstrual cycle is one of these. Sims is frustrated that this isn’t addressed enough in sport and training. “This is one of the reasons girls quit sports because no one talks about it… and wait until you get to the perimenopause and menopause; it’s like tumbleweeds,” says one female athlete. She has also seen clients in her own practice who have felt it was normal and “easier” for their periods to disappear during intense training.
We still lack a large and robust body of research to tailor training and competition around a fundamental aspect of the physiology of many top athletes, despite the fact that some studies have suggested that it can be helpful to plan strength training around your menstrual cycle and that you may even be more at risk of injury in particular stages of your cycle. In terms of nutrition, Sims claims that studies on the ketogenic diet, paleo intermittent fasting, and high-intensity interval training are all conducted on (often sedentary) men before being extended to the fitness population as a whole. “If we look at how women have been marginalized [in this process], they’re just assuming that this information is going to work for them as well.”
This mindset is also letting women down when it comes to something as fundamental as equipment, says Lynn Le. She’s the founder of women’s boxing gear and sportswear brand Society Nine (named after the Title IX legislation that made gender discrimination in sport illegal).
A former kickboxing instructor, Le founded the Portland, Oregon company in 2013 after struggling for years with combat sports equipment that hadn’t been designed for women. Clients would show up to her classes in “some brand’s version of a pink glove,” or children’s boxing gloves, which almost never fit well or felt supportive. The material felt super chintzy; it just had no realm of seriousness at all in either fit or quality, and I realised I didn’t really have a place to direct them.”
Le herself had resorted to doubling up on the hand wraps usually used by combat fighters, so she could force her hand into a fist inside men’s gloves that were too big. As women’s hands are narrower than men’s, Le knew that a dedicated design was necessary not just for comfort but for basic safety.
“[In combat sport] your first line of defense is creating that shock absorption through the power of your own body, which is compressing your hand into as close of a perfectly formed fist as you can. If you’re wearing a glove that’s two sizes too big, how on earth can you possibly do that? … You want to enjoy what you’re doing, and to enjoy what you’re doing, you want to wear things that are comfortable, support you and help you prevent injury.”
