--- title: Lauren Fleshman: Sports Place Women at War With Their Bodies description: The unrealistic ideals placed on female athletes are not only ignorant, but also deeply harmful, writes Lauren Fleshman. canonical: https://time.com/6261404/sports-female-body-inclusivity/ author: Lauren Fleshman article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-03-10T12:00:02.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:21.647Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Sports Were Never Designed Around the Female Body og:description: The unrealistic ideals placed on female athletes are not only ignorant, but also deeply harmful, writes Lauren Fleshman. og:url: https://time.com/6261404/sports-female-body-inclusivity/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltacce757ba6092c94/698a3af04ee2627b6931b2be/NCAA-2022-Women-Track.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: 2022 NCAA Division I Men's and Women's Outdoor Track & Field Championship og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Sports Were Never Designed Around the Female Body twitter:description: The unrealistic ideals placed on female athletes are not only ignorant, but also deeply harmful, writes Lauren Fleshman. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltacce757ba6092c94/698a3af04ee2627b6931b2be/NCAA-2022-Women-Track.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Sports Were Never Designed Around the Female Body > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ## Video: Power Slap Has Competitors Slap Each Other as Hard as Possible. Here's Why That's Dangerous. [Watch (HLS stream): Power Slap Has Competitors Slap Each Other as Hard as Possible. Here's Why That's Dangerous.](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/K40TuGnR.m3u8) (3:05)  _Published 2023-01-26. Last week, many Americans were introduced to slap fighting and 'Power Slap' the new combat sports outfit backed by the UFC and its lighting-rod president, Dana White. Several sports-medicine experts have since criticized the TBS program. "It is a recipe for brain injury and a recipe for disaster," neuroscientist Chris Nowinski, co-founder and CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, tells TIME._ by [Lauren Fleshman](https://time.com/author/lauren-fleshman/) ## Lauren Fleshman Mar 10, 2023 12:00 PM UTC  Gabrielle Wilkinson of the Florida Gators and other competitors run in the women’s 800 meter final during the Division I Men's and Women's Outdoor Track and Field Championships held at Hayward Field on June 11, 2022 in Eugene, Oregon. Gabrielle Wilkinson of the Florida Gators and other competitors run in the women’s 800 meter final during the Division I Men's and Women's Outdoor Track and Field Championships held at Hayward Field on June 11, 2022 in Eugene, Oregon. Jamie Schwaberow—NCAA Photos/Getty Images by [Lauren Fleshman](https://time.com/author/lauren-fleshman/) ## Lauren Fleshman Mar 10, 2023 12:00 PM UTC Ever since [Title IX](https://time.com/4822600/title-ix-womens-sports/) opened the door to our participation, female athletes have been encouraged, or even required, to fight their body’s natural development and restrict their diet to keep up with the boys. But no matter how many news stories come out about the epidemic of disordered eating and subsequent injuries and trauma for women in high school and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sports, we have continually failed to address the root issue: sports, as we know it, have never been designed around the developmental norms of the female body. As a woman with nearly three decades in elite sport, first as a five-time NCAA and two-time USA champion athlete, and later, a coach of professional female distance runners, my direct experience and research shows how insidious and widespread this problem is for female athletes across a variety of sports, while our institutions are doing little more than shrug. Why female athletes are experiencing harm in such large numbers isn’t a mystery. The sports institutions we fought to gain access to were designed by men for men and boys, and the system is built around physiology and performance norms for male bodies aged 14 to 22\. But the male body develops in an entirely different way than the female body. A culture of leanness and expectations of linear progression may make sense for bodies that are responding to an influx of testosterone and androgens. Expecting the same of the female body during those same years is not only ignorant, it is also deeply harmful. --- ### More from TIME --- Typical healthy female puberty invests in the development of tissues such as breasts and other body composition shifts that are not immediately beneficial to performance, making the female body softer than the male body, even in elite athletics. In natural development, females can expect a temporary performance dip or plateau while the body adjusts to puberty and the menstrual cycle before making a second rise toward its prime. The cause of the plateau is normal and essential, but a lack of basic education about the female body causes it to be viewed as a deviation from the ideal or a devastating setback. Coaches and athletes associate male-like body fat levels with fitness, leading to a culture of body shaming and endorsement of food restriction. So much of the embodied experience of females during adolescence is viewed as a problem to be fixed or minimized. The result is that women and girls are placed at war with their own bodies. **_Read More:_**[_After ‘Devastating’ Supreme Court Decision Overturning Roe v. Wade, Women Athletes Worry About Their Future_](https://time.com/6190819/women-athletes-roe-abortion-reactions/) To combat this, we must assemble and mobilize the research that clearly demonstrates how female athletes are experiencing harm, and how that harm shows up long-term. [Two to three times](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5687241/) as many females as males develop stress fractures in NCAA sports. They experience anxiety at roughly [twice the rate](https://aoj.amegroups.com/article/view/5945/html) of their male peers. In response to the inhospitable environment for female development where [60% of females](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00223980.2013.846291?needAccess=true&journalCode=vjrl20%29,) report pressure from coaching concerning body shape, an alarming 54% of female athletes report being dissatisfied with their weight, and of these, almost 90% believe they are overweight by an average of 13.6 pounds. [35%](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19254889/) of female collegiate athletes are at risk of anorexia, (vs 10% of males) and 58% are at risk of bulimia (vs 35% of males). These diseases are extremely serious, carrying the [second highest mortality rate](https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/statistics-research-eating-disorders) of all mental illnesses behind [opioid addiction](https://www.state.sc.us/dmh/anorexia/statistics.htm). They break bones, impair mental function, damage major organs, and strain social relationships—and are notoriously difficult to recover from. Early intervention is key to having a chance at a full recovery, but the NCAA has no formal policy for eating disorders, despite creating the ideal environment for them to propagate. As football coaches long did with concussions, coaches often look the other way—exploiting the temporary performance benefit that comes with weight loss, and failing to make the connection when everything comes crashing down. In the absence of formal policy or best practices, the individual programs and coaches that are trying to solve the problem are winging it. Those who prioritize athlete health can suffer losses to teams that exploit athlete bodies for points. This problem is far too serious to take a laissez-faire approach. The result of an unrealistic body ideal and unchecked energy deficiency is an epidemic of [RED-S](https://answers.childrenshospital.org/relative-energy-deficiency-red-s/), (relative energy deficiency in sport), a syndrome of impaired physiological function that is the focus of a surge in research right now. A remarkable [80%](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1538544222001110#:~:text=A%202021%20study%20of%20elite,%2C%20immunologic%2C%20and%20psychologic%20categories) of female athletes screened for RED-S had at least one symptom, with period abnormalities being among the easiest to identify. Female athletes have experienced menstrual dysfunction at such high rates in sports for so many years that a lost period has come to be mistakenly viewed by many coaches, athletes, and even medical professionals as a “normal” response to training despite an abundance of research demonstrating that a healthy hormonal cycle is absolutely essential for immune function, recovery, sexual function, reproduction, mental health, and more. Bone health is a particular area of concern for female athletes facing RED-S. During the ages female athletes need to be building their lifetime bone bank, too many are doing the opposite. One study of high school female runners average age seventeen showed that [nearly half had a history of period loss and 42% had low bone mineral](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7605010/) density. Those who go on to compete in college will be subject to two to three times the rate of stress fractures as their male peers, and if they have RED-S, fracture risk is four to five times more likely, all this despite participating in a sport widely known to increase bone density in the general population. The legacy continues years later: Former elite runners in their 60s were found to be [more likely](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28886822/) to have osteoporosis and bone fractures than their non-athlete peers. Now that we are finally able to study athletes into older ages, we can see that generations of women are carrying the invisible wounds of their sport experiences. Monitoring, protecting, and talking about menstruation—a basic human function that affects half the population—is key to identifying and preventing harm, but our overwhelmingly male coaches often can’t even say the word “period” without euphemisms. At a minimum, we need mandatory education on female puberty and physiology for all coaches. As with concussions, addressing who is responsible is an essential next step in the path forward. Concussions were previously viewed as the athlete’s problem, an occasional bad luck consequence of playing the sport. But when research showed how concussions actually stemmed from institutional neglect, everything changed. The harm is now attributed to poor prevention and treatment policies in the sporting institutions, making the institutions themselves liable. Once it potentially costs more to ignore a problem than fix it, concrete changes follow. If women and girls were placed in sporting environments built around the norms of female puberty and female improvement trajectories, if their bodies were respected and encouraged to develop in their own time, outcomes for women would be entirely different. We can utilize the research on female athletes to drive change, and we must. But this story goes far beyond statistics. I’ve lived it. Countless women who have gone through our sports systems carry a story about themselves that isn’t true. They were told something was wrong with their changing bodies, when they were actually right on time for a timeline nobody around them was educated about. This false story changed their sport experiences and their conceptions of themselves. The war against one’s body extends years beyond one’s final competition, creating a kind of psychological static that colors so much of life. We cannot quantify this kind of pain or loss as easily as broken bones, but if we decide we care, if we are strategic, we can prevent it. ## Transcript That's 11. 2. Any hit to the head is dangerous. What is really sad about power slap. Is that it's a, it's an undefendable hit in which a person with, as much power as they possibly can into the air. And so, it is a recipe for brain injury in a recipe for disaster. No one ever gets compared to things like boxing or mixed martial arts but Nicole there is to avoid getting hit in the head and hear you can't avoid it. And so a situation is happening, that didn't really happen to any real sport before which is you or somebody can just wind up and hit you with an unprotected hand, you know, just cuz it's your pain doesn't mean it's not your arm and the boat into your hand striking somebody and even the whole concept that it comes from the side, causes your head to rotate rapidly and makes the brain. Reaction worse than a bit, just punched you in the face. So in the short-term, getting hit in the head, this hard will cause a traumatic brain injury. Some percentage of time that was seen in the highlights for the first show. There were multiple traumatic brain injury with a traumatic brain injury. You especially with rotational acceleration, you're literally causing physical damage to the brain. You're stretching axons security acts on which a connection between your neuronal Connections. Three parts of the brain and those will not heal. So you may recover function but once you bring tissue has gone in your brain, basically has to work around it and so people are probably suffering symptoms for days weeks months than three years. But also they're losing their resilience to keep getting hit in the head. Until eventually those hit will cause longer and longer damage and more permanent damage The Chronic side is. The more hits to the head. If you take too much of force, the more likely you are to develop a disease called chronic traumatic. Encephalopathy the Nerdist generative disease that we first on boxers neck. I was thinking all kind of sport athletes. We don't know what the minimum threshold number of hits are we can say they're getting hit in the head. Three to five times a week of this type of shit is not a normal thing and you would assume put you at risk for this disease long. But other things that come with our generation from had him. Backed Parkinson's is related to this ALS as we waited needs his head so you really getting set up for your brain to fall apart over time. There, there's no way to make this safe. And so rather than talking about, you know, what should the doctors intervene faster? Or shouldn't there be a net underneath them so they don't fall off their head. 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