In this study, Superhera partnered with anthropologists, Katie Rose Hejtmanek of Brooklyn College, CUNY and Cara Ocobock of the University of Notre Dame to better understand how sportswear impacts performance, health, and mentality.

We attempted to understand how female athletes feel about their sportswear, how their sportswear fits, and how the feeling about and fit of sportswear affects their behaviors and body image.

“Fit” is far and away the most important feature for sportswear with 73.5% of respondents listing it as the first or second more important feature.

“Feel” seems to slightly out rank “function”. The least important feature is “Look” with 50.9% ranking it as #4. This highlight’s women’s desire to have clothing that properly fits their bodies.

More than a third of women who responded to this survey felt that their sportswear did not fit them properly, suggesting that a great deal of improvement is still needed in this industry.

However, more than half of the women who responded to this survey said they considered dieting in order to better fit into their sportswear. This conflicts slightly with responses to the previous question about whether sportswear fits properly (as only a third said it didn’t).

The free response answers provide more nuance to this issue, as many of the respondents who said their sportswear did fit correctly hedged in their answers.

Also, when asked what actions they take when sportswear does not fit, 61% said they either “sucked it up” or modified the sportswear to fit their individual needs.

In other words, the majority of female athletes took responsibility for the sportswear not fitting by “dealing with it” themselves, either through altering the clothing itself or trying to, as one respondent wrote “tough it out.”

Definitive “yes” to fit was rare, with many responding that some things fit or some things fit certain parts of their bodies but not other parts (for example, too tight in the thighs) and that they just had to make do (including “cry” as one respondent wrote). Well over a third of athletes in this sample have restricted their diet to fit into their sportswear. This could have major implications for performance and is a concerning result.

Gearing a diet towards fitting into sportswear rather than gearing a diet to actual performance needs could harm athletic success, but more importantly harm overall health and wellbeing. A negative energy balance, when one expends more calories than they consume, can be particularly detrimental for athletes. Female Athlete Triad refers to the interaction between energy availability, menstrual function, and bone mineral density seen among female athletes.

Individuals with Female Athlete Triad may exhibit eating disorders, oligomenorrhea, amenorrhea, osteoporosis, and an increased risk for musculoskeletal injury such as stress
fractures (Nattiv et al., 2007).

This constellation of symptoms and injuries can lead to reproductive, cardiovascular, nervous system, and skeletal mobility issues later in life. Ill-fitting sportswear appears to be negatively affecting athletes through restrictive diets, and could also be negatively affecting them on multiple levels yet to be fully explored. Respondents were very quick to link strength with female athletes in the abstract, more so than actual looks (muscularity). They also were quick to use the framework of “confident.”

However, when asking about themselves, they were less likely to use either of these terms (strong or confident) to describe why they looked like a female athlete. Perhaps this is the “mindset” and “nothing” that many who filled-in “Other” answers to “what should change for a better fit.” That so many thought that they needed to view themselves more positively rather than change their body or the industry is telling, especially in conversation with the fact that so few saw themselves as “strong” when half linked strength with what a female athlete looks like.

The idea that one could both be strong and restrict food/fuel remains a dilemma for female athletes. Food was often linked to being “fat” or “overweight;” many athletes wanted to lower body weight, lose fat, or change their body composition to better fit into their sportswear. Restricting food does not lead to increased strength in athletes. One respondent wrote this out explicitly in what should change for a better fit:

“Food is fuel!! If you grow as an athlete, you should not be restricting food to compensate for growth.”

However, this was one singular response about food as fuel for athletic pursuits. That only one female athlete has this perspective on food as fuel for being strong or athletic struck the researchers as significant. While we did not explicitly ask our participants to discuss the role of the media or media representations of female athletes in our survey, many of our respondents mentioned “the media” or “stereotypes” when discussing if they looked like a female athlete (less so when we asked what a female athlete in general looked like).

The literature on the role of the media on women’s sports participation and experiences therein helps one better understand the inherent connection many female athletes make between themselves and the larger world of “female athletes” as produced by sports media.

One potential explanation for the disconnect between how our respondents described female athletes compared to how they viewed themselves is apologetic behavior.

Female athletes may downplay their more athletic or “masculine” characteristics to appear more feminine and fit within the publicly accepted stereotype (Rasmussen et al., 2021). Apologetic behaviors among female athletes can take on numerous forms (see Davis-Delano et al., 2009), but the ones that our respondents include emphasizing small size and fitness, emphasizing a feminine appearance, and downplaying athleticism.

This can be seen in how our respondents rated their non-sporting bodies more negatively than their sporting bodies, and how they downplayed their own strength in their free response answers.

In line with our findings, other researchers found that over 72% of female athletes surveyed engaged in at least one form of apologetic behavior (Davis-Delano et al., 2009). Finally, while not an apologetic behavior per se, that fact that so many of our survey respondents took on the responsibility of ill-fitting sportswear is a cause for concern. Similarly to restricting eating or other harmful behavior, female athletes put the burden on themselves to “deal with” many of the negative aspects of their sporting lives. This includes “sucking it up” when their sportswear doesn’t fit or modifying sportswear themselves to make it fit better. That only 35.5% would exchange it for a different size is telling.

Rather than ask the coach or equipment managers for the correct size, most of our respondents “dealt with it” themselves. Female athletes should not have to navigate ill-fitting sportswear on their own. The onus should not be on them to find ways for it to fit their bodies, either through restricting food intake or sportswear modification.

Conclusion

Female athletes overwhelmingly think of other female athletes as strong and confident.

However, fewer of them see themselves as strong and confident and many wonder if they fit the media stereotypes of what a female athlete looks like. Whether they suffer with Female Athlete Triad, engage in apologetic behavior, or find other ways to cope with negative or deeming media or ill-fitting sportswear, our study reveals that female athletes continue to struggle with a wide range of issues. One potential intervention is to systematically change their sportswear, rather than rely on individual women to “deal with it.” By making sportswear geared towards female athletes, they might feel more empowered in their bodies and clothes on and off the field.

Superhera: Freedom to Perform

• Read our Mission 
• Read the Press Release here
• Learn more about our Predictive Fit Technology 
• Read the study from Superhera and the University of Notre Dame Department of Anthropology

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