The Women's Sports Revolution: Yesterday,Today,Tomorrow?

The 2020s have been a paradigm shifting decade for women's sports. Within the first half of this decade, we have seen significant changes to women's sports domestically and globally. For instance, the Paris 2024 Olympics became the first in history to achieve full gender parity in athletic competition entailing equal representation of female and male athletes on the field of play (Buhler, 2024). Simultaneously, women's sports organizations saw notable professional developments: established leagues like the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) expanded, former leagues like the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) returned, and new leagues such as the Unrivaled 3v3 basketball league were planned and sold out tickets before it had even started. According to The Gist, a women's sports media outlet, “if 2023 marked the rise of the women's sports movement, 2024 was the year of its revolution” (The Gist, 2024). This pronouncement seemed to insinuate that “the stories, the product and the investments” of women's sports were ultimately proving to be valuable business in the year 2024 (Robbins, 2024).

In the year 2024, after months of record-breaking attendance, skyrocketing viewership, and intensified cultural attention to women's sports, brands and marketing teams have had to rethink their strategies and seriously consider investing in the burgeoning business space of women's sports (Joseph, 2024; Kaufman, 2025). However, for long-time women's sports fans and viewers, these accolades and optimistic potentials come with skepticism. The history of women's sports in the United States has seen other confident and hopeful moments similar to this one. At various instances over the last century, critics, scholars, and sports fans have excitedly imagined a near-future where women's sports would finally be taken seriously. Unfortunately, almost none such aspirations of sporting legitimacy have been realized or endured. Amidst the waxing and waning of this optimism, CL Cole's scholarship has advanced a complex charting of the relationship between feminism, commercialism, and sport allowing us to better understand these upswings and downturns. In short, the prescience of Cole's scholarship in the late 1990s and early 2000s offers important insights for scholars considering the current moment 25 years later.

In their scholarship, Cole has managed to balance pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will regarding the changing women's sports landscape. For instance, in a February 2000 issue of The Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Cole wrote a brief, but significant piece titled, “The Year That Girls Ruled.” The piece concentrates on the cultural atmosphere surrounding the Women's World Cup in 1999. The New York Times had asked Cole to write a piece on “the state of women's sports,” which if all went well, would hit the presses as the World Cup began (Cole, 2000, p. 3). Cole produced an editorial that they deemed “respectful, but critical” covering the growing commodification and commercialization of women's sports at the turn of the century. As it turns out, the piece was not published on opening day; the Times did not publish Cole's editorial at all. In the 1990s Girl Power moment and amidst the corporatization and professionalization of women's sports in the United States, perhaps the mainstream media was not ready for a realistic or critical piece examining the increasing popularity of women in professional sports.

In “The Year That Girls Ruled,” Cole (2000) celebrated expanding mainstream attention to women's sports and recognized that female athletes of the late 1990s had garnered “opportunities that were not only unavailable but unthinkable 10 years ago” (p. 4). Yet, alongside Cole's appreciation that female athletes were getting more professional prospects and visibility, they doubted the corporate and media messaging being sold to the public that “this is a glorious era for sporting women” (Cole, 2000, p. 4). Here, Cole recognized that the producers of this fantasy were predominantly multinational companies, like Gatorade and Nike, with a vested interest in generating profit from the previously under-exploited sphere of women's sports. As an insightful media studies and cultural critic, Cole noticed that advertising featured new and high-profile female athletes like Mia Hamm and offered the public a particular vision of women's sports: a corporate celebrity feminism (Cole, 2000, p. 5). This mode of feminism, defined by a “post-feminist imaginary” was largely circumscribed by normative feminine desires such as consumption, marriage, family, and performing gender “properly” (Cole & Hribar, 1995, p. 358). In this moment, brands, such as Nike, operationalized feminist rhetoric through women's sports celebrities, generating a commodified form of feminism focused on individual choice and maintaining the status quo (Cole & Hribar, 1995). Therefore, while historically women's sports in America had been marginalized and associated with non-normative forms of femininity, Cole understood how corporations were beginning to see ways they could take advantage of the political, feminist space of women's sports and mold it into an easily consumable commodity for the mainstream public.

Cole's expansive and nuanced understanding of the late 1990s/early 2000s political conjuncture enabled them to spotlight and celebrate women's sports achievements, while remaining wary and critical of the ways brand and market logics were shaping the conditions of possibility for a women's sports future. In other words, Cole understood the trajectory of popular feminism from the 1980s onward and questioned whether a corporate-led women's sports structure would truly empower women and embrace a feminist perspective. For example, Cole saw in 1999 the ways that economies of visibility were becoming a brand logic that used visibility politics as a means of developing profit, rather than bringing “awareness to identities and issues that have been marginalized or concealed” such as women's sports (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Click & Press, 2015, p. 5). Brands, such as Nike, Adidas, McDonalds, and others, began to identify the financial potential in selling women's sports through a celebration of difference. However, these brands only affirmed diversity in a way that spoke to “market choice and the promise of individual freedom” in order to boost profits (Gray, 2013, p. 771). Even before the economic downturn of the early 2000s, which lead to the collapse of many emerging women's sports leagues in the United States, Cole prophetically identified the ways multinational capitalism and consumption were driving the interest in women's sports. With this in mind, Cole urged scholars and other stakeholders in women's sports to remain cautious against this optimistic messaging and broader corporate empowerment narratives. Even during the “year that girls ruled,” Cole understood that infusing women's sports with “a feel-good commodity activism” would only make it more “difficult to think about the everyday struggles…facing ordinary women” and thus inhibit further feminist mobilization (Cole, 2000, p. 5). Within this framework, women's sports would be cleansed of politics and accepted into the welcoming arms of multinational corporations as a superficial and profitable entity. Cole knew that the visibility and commodification of women's sports could not be presumed to be “a panacea for gender inequity in sports” or a salve for everyday injustices experienced by women (McClearen, 2021, p. 4). While the “feminism” presented through corporate women's sports campaigns centered women's athletic accomplishments, it produced a false sense of liberation and replaced politics with profits.

Across Cole's scholarly corpus, they masterfully map the relationship between sports, media, and capitalism, and decades into their career, Cole's body of work is more salient and significant than ever. During the 2020s, cultural interest in American women's sports has exploded, with television ratings, attendance, profits, and franchise valuations hitting record numbers across different leagues, sports, and scales (Badenhausen, 2024). In 2024, advertizers expended $244 million on women's’ sports—a 139% increase from the previous year (Elsesser, 2025). In light of these major developments, it might be tempting to join the frenzy over the meteoric rise of women's sports in American society and culture. However, we should heed Cole's warnings, which are still as relevant today as they were 25 years ago. Cole's scholarship demands that their readers balance their excitement with the reminder that “there are real limits to the feelings of efficacy that we desire and experience in our sporting consumption” (Cole, 2000, p. 6). In other words, while it is exciting for women's sports to rapidly become more visible, we must always consider who does this consumption benefit and what ideologies are upheld through our sporting consumption—especially when it is women's sports. Cole sagely pushes us to “be more conscious of what we consume and…[examine] our desire for and pleasures in the meanings and values attributed to women's sports that make it difficult to think about the role of multinational capitalism, consumption, and everyday struggles” (2000, p. 7). Following Cole, we ought to regard women's sports and the branding of women's sports culture not as a site of imminent liberation, but as a critical space that provides significant insights into the ways that gender and capitalism become mobilized within neoliberalism and broader global capitalist regimes. Cole's critical examination of sport and its relation to capitalism has built an indispensable scholarly foundation for research that is particularly needed now as new market logics emerge in our ever-changing sporting landscape.