Team Canada equipment managers take sticks and equipment back to the locker room at Wukesong Sports Centre at the Beijing Olympics in February, 2022.Bruce Bennett/Getty Images AsiaPac
Ine Mylle is a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University’s Run Lab, in B.C., where she investigates breast biomechanics in physically active women with the use of wearable technology.
Imagine French superstar Kylian Mbappé lacing up a pair of soccer boots before the World Cup final that were designed for a narrower heel, a different arch, a foot shape that is not his.
Imagine him trying to explain to his coach, mid-sprint, why his ankle keeps rolling. Nobody would buy it. Nobody would even suggest it. Yet this is what the sports industry has been asking female athletes to do for decades.
Women’s sport is having a genuine moment. There have been record attendances, TV deals and all-time high participation from girls picking up a ball for the first time. But behind the headlines, there is a stubborn, uncomfortable truth: the equipment female athletes rely on were largely designed for a body that is not theirs.
The industry’s default solution has long been to take a male product, make it smaller, make it pink, slap a women’s label on it and call it a day. Sports scientists have a name for this: “shrink it and pink it.” It is exactly as inadequate as it sounds.
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The consequences are measurable. Soccer boots engineered around male foot anatomy (i.e., wider heels, flatter and stiffer arches) alter the way a woman’s lower body absorbs force when she plants, pivots and sprints. Running shoes built from male biomechanical data interact differently with female runners, affecting the way they move in ways that accumulate into injury over time.
Then there is the sports bra, a product designed exclusively for women, which you might assume has been exhaustively researched. You would be wrong. Seven out of 10 female athletes experience exercise-related breast pain, which is routinely dismissed as a training error rather than being recognized for what it is: a design misconception.
Most sports bras still operate on simple compression principles rather than genuine biomechanical control. Research shows that a tight underband increases the work of breathing, elevates oxygen uptake and disrupts ventilation, all of which expose a meaningful drag on performance.
Here is the paradox that should keep sports executives on their toes: Female athletes are performing at the highest levels, yet the equipment designed to support them may be quietly generating a preventable cycle of discomfort and injury.
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Fewer than 40 per cent of sports-injury prevention studies include female-specific data. That means the science underpinning equipment design is mostly based on research that did not include the people who will be using the product. Female athletes are an afterthought in the laboratory, and that translates to poor quality equipment and clothing in retail.
Developing a soccer boot from female-specific foot anatomy and biomechanics requires new research, new shoe lasts (molds) and new testing frameworks. Without large-scale female-centred data, there is no commercial case to make the investment. Or at least, that’s what industry says.
It sounds like a reasonable argument until you notice the circular logic: the industry will not fund the research because there is no data, and there is no data because the industry will not fund the research. Meanwhile, the market for women’s sport is growing at a pace that makes this foot-dragging look not just scientifically indefensible but commercially short-sighted.
Some brands are beginning to move. But what is needed now is a systematic shift, not a few isolated products that work well as a marketing stunt. Sports scientists must embed themselves in product-development pipelines with larger retail companies, not just peer-reviewed journals. Female athletes – diverse ones, across body types, life stages and sports – must be co-designers, not just focus-group participants who have the “ideal” female body according to Instagram.
Equipment must be tested in the conditions it will actually be used in. And the hormonal realities of the female lifespan – puberty, the menstrual cycle, pregnancy and menopause – must be treated as design parameters not methodological inconveniences to be controlled out of a study.
This is not a niche issue for sports scientists to argue about in specialist journals. It is a question of basic equity for the millions of Canadian girls and women who play sport – from the recreational runner trying to make it around the park without pain, to the elite forward lining up in a World Cup match.
Kylian Mbappé, of course, has boots that fit perfectly. They were designed with his feet, his biomechanics, his sport in mind. Every great athlete deserves that. The women’s game is growing fast enough that the industry can no longer afford to treat female athletes as a smaller, pinker version of the real thing. It is time to build for her.