Top Women Breaking Barriers in Sports Today

For a long time, women in sport were handed smaller stages, thinner budgets, and quieter crowds. They competed anyway, and most of the time, they outperformed every expectation. The last five years have felt different. Women athletes aren't just competing at elite level anymore. They're filling stadiums, breaking records that stood for decades, and pulling in commercial money that used to flow exclusively toward men's leagues. About half the global population followed women's sport in 2024, up from 45 per cent in 2022.

Media coverage tripled between 2019 and 2022 according to the United Nations board for equity, after sitting at roughly five per cent for three decades. Between 2022 and 2024, revenue from women's sports grew four and a half times faster than revenue from men's. Paris 2024 was the first Olympic Games in history where women and men competed in equal numbers. The shift isn't new anymore. It's the baseline.

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Caitlin Clark, Alexia Putellas, Katie Taylor. And behind them, a generation doing the same thing across every discipline. Faith Kipyegon broke her own 1500m world record at the 2024 Paris Diamond League, then went to the Olympics and won gold for the third consecutive time over that distance.

Simone Biles came back from Tokyo, where she'd had to step away mid-competition, and left Paris with three golds and a silver, the most decorated American Olympian in history.

Tigst Assefa ran a marathon in 2:11:53 in Berlin in 2023, the only woman ever to finish under 2:12, beating the previous record by more than two minutes. In swimming, Summer McIntosh broke two world records at 16.

Femke Bol shattered a 40-year-old indoor 400m world record and then broke her own time a few weeks later. What they share isn't just the performances. It's that each one has made it harder for leagues, broadcasters, and sponsors to keep treating women's sport as secondary. The records are part of it, but so is everything around them: the crowds, the commercial deals, the conversations shifting in boardrooms that used to ignore the sport entirely.

Track, Court & Field: The Performance Revolution

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone has broken the 400m hurdles world record four times since 2021, dropping from 52.20 seconds to 50.65 at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest. Each time, she makes the previous mark look modest. To put that in context, the record she inherited in 2021 had itself only been set two years earlier.

Between 2021 and 2024, she broke the world record four times. Each new mark didn't just beat the previous one; it made it look slow. The 52.20 she ran in Tokyo had itself only been set two years earlier, yet by Budapest 2023 she was down to 50.65, and by Paris 2024 she'd pushed that to 50.37. To put that in context, the previous world record had stood for 18 years before she came along. No other athlete in any event has moved the global benchmark that many times in that short a window.

At the other end of the career spectrum, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce was still running sub-10.7 seconds at 37, which quietly forced a rethink of how training, recovery, and sports science apply to women athletes when the infrastructure is actually there. In tennis, Iga Świątek has brought back a kind of dominance the women's game hadn't seen since Serena Williams. Part of what makes her interesting beyond the titles is her public commitment to sports psychology as a training tool, working with mental performance coach Piotr Lewandowski since her teens. It's a model other programs are now following.

World Record Progression: Women’s 400m Hurdles, an infographic by Joao Guarda (with AI) for Sportsdna

Basketball, Football & the Audience Inflection Point

Caitlin Clark's arrival in the WNBA in 2024 was one of those moments sport doesn't manufacture. She'd already broken Pete Maravich's all-time NCAA scoring record, a record that had stood for 44 years, and she brought a fanbase with her that had never watched women's basketball before. The average WNBA game drew 347,000 viewers in 2020. By the time Clark's rookie season ended in 2024, that figure had reached 1.19 million, with the Indiana Fever's most-watched game peaking at 2.3 million.

The 2024 Finals drew 201% more viewers than the year before. Sponsors that had spent years ignoring the league started bidding for association. The conversation in boardrooms shifted from "can women's sport attract an audience?" to "why did we wait this long?" Angel Reese's simultaneous rise added a second storyline the league had never had the luxury of running at the same time.

In football, the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup drew over two billion cumulative viewers globally, nearly double the 1.12 billion reached by the 2019 edition in France. The tournament's impact hit differently at home: Australia's Matildas semi-final drew 11.15 million domestic viewers, the most-watched television event in Australian history at the time. Spain's victory put players like Alexia Putellas, two-time Ballon d'Or Féminin winner at FC Barcelona, and Australia's Sam Kerr in front of audiences that dwarfed anything previous editions had managed. Advocates like Billie Jean King and organisations like the Women's Sports Foundation have used that momentum to push harder on the structural conversations: broadcast rights, equal prize money, and facility investment.

Women’s Basketball Under the Lights, an editorial sports photograph by Joao Guarda (with AI) for Sportsdna

Combat Sports & The Normalisation of Women's Power

Ten years ago, women's MMA was treated as a novelty. Amanda Nunes retired as arguably the greatest mixed martial artist of her era, regardless of gender, having beaten every women's champion she faced across two weight classes across a seven-year reign that began when she defeated Ronda Rousey in 48 seconds in 2016. Zhang Weili and Valentina Shevchenko built fan followings that compete directly with their male counterparts on UFC cards. The sport stopped needing to justify their presence.

Boxing followed a similar arc. Women's boxing wasn't even part of the Olympic programme until London 2012. By Paris 2024 it returned with expanded weight categories, a quiet measure of how far the sport had moved institutionally in just over a decade. Katie Taylor has sold out arenas across the UK and Ireland consistently, and her 2023 rematch against Chantelle Cameron at the 3Arena Dublin set an attendance record for a women's boxing event in Europe. What's changed isn't just the attendance. It's the commercial model around it: pay-per-view slots, dedicated streaming deals, and sponsorship portfolios that treat women's boxing as a product worth building rather than a gap to fill on a card.

Women in Combat Sports: Key Milestones, an infographic by Joao Guarda (with AI) for Sportsdna

The Gender Gap in pay and media coverage

The FIFA Women's World Cup prize pool reached $152 million in 2023, a 300 per cent increase on 2019, which sounds significant until you place it next to the $440 million handed out at the men's tournament in Qatar the year before. The average WNBA salary sits at around $130,000. The NBA average is $9.7 million. Caitlin Clark, the WNBA's top draft pick in 2024, took home a rookie salary of $77,000. Victor Wembanyama, the NBA's equivalent that same year, earned $12.2 million. The Women's Tour de France carries a €250,000 prize pool against €2.3 million for the men's race. Tennis is the only major sport to have reached full prize parity at the top level, and it got there in 2007.

The salary figures are only part of the picture. Men earn approximately 21 times more in playing salary than women across elite sport. Female athletes take 82 per cent of their total compensation from endorsements, compared to 37 per cent for men, which means women's earnings are far more vulnerable to sponsorship decisions they have little control over. A 2022 study found that while female professional athletes depend twice as much on sponsorship income as male athletes, men received 90 per cent of the sponsorship dollars. A 2024 survey found that 58 per cent of female athletes earned $25,000 or less annually from their sport.

The gaps run further than pay. In 2024, just 8 per cent of sports coverage on key broadcast channels was devoted to women's sport. Women's sports stories were 22 per cent less likely to be framed as serious competition than men's, and women athletes were nearly twice as likely to be discussed in terms of their appearance rather than their performance. Off the pitch, women hold 18 per cent of qualified coaching positions and just 9 per cent of senior coaching roles. Women's teams in Jamaica, Colombia, Nigeria and South Africa have reported unpaid salaries. A FIFPRO survey found that 29 per cent of women players had not been paid by their national federations for World Cup qualifying tournaments.

No women featured on the Forbes 2025 list of the 50 highest-paid athletes in the world. Not one. The audiences are there. The demand is there. The institutions just haven't caught up yet.

Conclusion

The direction has been consistent, even when the pace hasn't. In 2021, the UEFA Women's Champions League secured its first standalone broadcast deal, giving the competition its own identity for the first time.

The following year, the US Women's National Soccer Team settled their equal pay case with US Soccer for $24 million after a six-year legal fight, and the NCAA women's basketball tournament finally received the official March Madness branding it had been denied for 40 years. In 2023, the NWSL signed a $240 million media rights deal. That same year, the PSA Women's World Squash Championship offered a larger prize pool than the men's event for the first time in the sport's history.

The Women's World Cup drew nearly two billion cumulative viewers globally, almost double the 2019 figure. By 2024, the WNBA was posting viewership numbers it had never seen. Sponsorship deals in women's professional sports increased by more than 22 per cent year on year.

The 2025 Women's Rugby World Cup final at Twickenham drew over 82,000 fans, and the ICC Women's Cricket World Cup final that same year pulled in 185 million viewers, matching the audience for the men's T20 final in 2024.

Australia, Norway, New Zealand and Brazil are among a growing list of national football federations that have committed to equal pay for their men's and women's national teams. The proportion of female IOC members has doubled since 2013, reaching 41 per cent. None of it came without sustained pressure from athletes who were competing at the highest level and pushing on the conditions they were doing it under at the same time.

The gaps are still significant. But the arguments that federations used to lean on, that the audiences weren't there, that the product wasn't commercially viable, are harder to make when Women's Cricket World Cup finals are matching T20 men's viewership and women's rugby is selling out Twickenham. The institutions are moving. Slowly in some places, faster in others, but the direction hasn't changed.