Board structure and gender gap in the sporting goods industry: the 2026 data

1. Board structure and gender in the sporting goods world (2025)
2. The gender breakdown of executive teams in the sporting goods world (2025)
3. Are leadership teams moving towards gender equality?
4. How does the sporting goods industry compare with the rest of the business world?
5. Why does female leadership matter?
6. Leadership gap: a commercial miscalculation
7. How did we get these numbers?

Board structure and gender in the sporting goods world (2025)

Out of 74 companies:

• 8 have females leading the board (10.6 percent).

• Women hold 30.4% of all board positions available.

• The mode average percentage of females on a board of directors is 33.3% percent.

• Just 1 company has no women on the board (less than one percent).

On the face of it, this appears positive, with all numbers slightly up from 2024. However:

• Only 7 companies (under 10%) of companies have 50 percent or more women on the board.

• Many companies have fewer board seats than in previous years. This means that the ratio of women on the board has gone up without any action being taken to improve the situation.

Lululemon continues to be the sports brand with the most gender equality in its leadership team. A female chair leads the board, which is 66.7% female. Likewise Super Retail Group’s female-led board has a 50% gender ratio. In general, boards with female chairs tend to be in the top half of the table for board gender diversity.

The gender breakdown of executive teams in the sporting goods world (2025)

Executive teams in the sporting goods industry still have a long way to go to achieve gender equality. First, the positives. From 89 sporting goods companies:

• 7 have female CEOs (7.9 percent).

From the 77 companies which have a breakdown of their executive team, the median average leadership team is 25% female. However, this doesn’t give the full picture:

• Women hold less than a quarter (23.9%) of all executive leadership positions available in the sporting goods industry.

• The majority of sporting goods companies (54.7%) have 25 percent or less women on their executive team.

• Only five companies (6.5%) have a leadership team which is 50% or more women.

• A quarter of sporting goods companies still have no women on their executive team (19 companies).

The recreational equipment consumer co-operative REI has the highest percentage of women on its leadership team, at 88.9% female. Female-led Lululemon also has a leadership team more than 50% female, as does Peloton and Halfords.

Are leadership teams moving towards gender equality in the sporting goods industry?

Leadership in the sporting goods industry is moving towards equality but the pace is slow.

This reflects the global situation, with progress that could be described as “glacial.” The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 projects that at this current rate of progress, full global gender equality will not be realized for another 123 years.

How does female leadership in the sporting goods industry compare with the rest of the business world?

Research from the World Economic Forum shows women represent 35.8% of all board members in the largest EU-listed companies, with the figure around 30.1% in America. This puts the sporting goods industry on a par with global business, in terms of gender equality in board composition.

But the sporting goods industry is now lagging behind other industries when it comes to gender equality at c-suite level. The representation of women in senior leadership roles currently stands at approximately 31.0% globally, according to LinkedIn data. In 2025, the sporting goods industry achieved only 23.9%.

At the highest level of leadership, the sporting goods industry sits in the middle of the global average, with 7.9% female CEOs. The fashion and apparel industry had between 12-14% female CEOs in 2025.

The fashion and apparel industry presents perhaps the most significant disparity between labor force participation and leadership representation. Approximately 80% of the global workforce in garment, textile, and footwear manufacturing are women, yet they are systematically shortchanged at the top of the corporate hierarchy, with less than 25% of board seats and less than 22% of c-suite positions. It would probably be safe to assume that a similar figure would apply to the sporting goods industry.

Female leadership progress is moving more quickly in manufacturing than in direct retail, according to non-profit LEAD Network. Consumer goods and manufacturing saw female representation in senior roles rise to 42% in 2025, a four percentage point increase over two years. Retail, by contrast, grew only one percentage point in the same period, reaching 36%. 

Why do these numbers matter? Because women constitute approximately half of the workforce and influence up to 80% of consumer spending in these categories. Yet there is a persistent disconnect between market influence and decision-making power.

Why do we need more female leadership?

Research continues to demonstrate an overwhelming link between gender diversity in senior management and improved business performance. Our previous analyses of gender diversity in executive leadership have pointed out the documented benefits of leadership diversity for businesses:

• More innovation.

• More revenue from new products and services.

• Higher cash flow returns on investments and lower leverage.

• Better rates of talent retention.

• More effective risk-management practices.

• Fewer financial reporting mistakes.

• Fewer controversial business practices such as fraud.

• Better ESG performance. 

But ethics and morality aside, by not having a more gender-balanced leadership, the sporting goods industry is missing out on billions in potential market. The monetization of women’s sports represents a $2.5 billion opportunity in the US alone by 2030, and capitalizing on this depends on brands and investors making “bold bets” on an immature market according to McKinsey. Will a board lacking in gender diversity see and indeed value such opportunities?

Women – and the female sporting market – must be considered as an entity not an afterthought. In many aspects of the sporting goods industry, what’s missing for women is inclusion. For female sporting goods consumers, a sense of inclusion can only come from:

• Female-specific products.

• Industry representation (e.g. advertising) which puts women’s participation on a par with men’s.

• Investment in females in sports visibly on a par with males in sports (e.g. sponsorship, female-spaces within brands, product development).

Research on commercials from brands like Nike indicates that they continue to treat sports as a stereotypically masculine realm. By portraying men in positions of power and authority while relegating women to decorative or aesthetic roles, commercials can reflect and reinforce societal norms that marginalize female athletes and participants in sports.

The lack of women in product design roles also has a direct, negative impact on the industry’s output. For years, the “shrink it and pink it” approach has dominated women’s product design – taking products built for men, reducing their size, and changing the color without considering physiological differences. For example, “gender neutral” or “unisex” football boots, which do not properly support the differences in female athletes’ feet may contribute to the disproportionate impact of ACL knee injuries among female footballers. When women’s specific needs are overlooked in product design it reinforces the perception that women’s sports are secondary.

If women’s voices carried more weight in the boardroom and the c-suite, the effects would ripple through the entire organization: product design built around female physiology rather than adapting male defaults; advertising that treats women as athletes, not an aesthetic; sponsorship strategies that treat women’s sport as an opportunity, not an obligation. The leadership gap is not only a fairness issue, it is the root cause of a series of commercial miscalculations the industry keeps making.

Leadership gap is a commercial miscalculation

As society continues to shift toward younger, more values-driven generations, the distance between a company’s leadership and the diversity of its consumers will become a primary driver of competitive risk. For the sporting goods industry, closing the leadership gender gap is no longer just a “moral imperative”; it is a prerequisite for survival in a multi-billion dollar global market where women are the fastest-growing segment of fans, athletes, and consumers.

The sporting goods industry has just witnessed the largest Olympic platform for women’s sport in history. Milano Cortina 2026 delivered a multi-billion-dollar audience, a global stage and a commercial inflection point for every brand that spent the last decade saying women matter. The companies best positioned to capitalize on that moment were those whose boards and executive teams already understood the female consumer from the inside.

The data in this report suggests the industry is not quite there. Board-level representation has inched forward; executive-level representation has stalled and, on one measure, gone backward. The gap between who buys and who decides is not merely an equity problem – it is a structural commercial risk, and an Olympic year makes the cost of that risk visible.

SGI Europe tracks this territory continuously – the business of women in sports, the sporting goods industry’s response to its fastest-growing consumer segment, and the leadership decisions that will determine who wins and who falls behind. Follow our dedicated coverage at Women × Sports × Sporting Goods:

Women × Sports × Sporting Goods