We know that girls who play sports grow up to be leaders. It’s a fun fact repeated often by women at the top of the business world, from Deloitte to the WNBA. Usually, these reports reveal that something like 94% of women in C-suite roles played sports growing up.
A new report from elf Beauty provides some more context on exactly how that happens. The beauty brand partnered with the women’s sports consultancy Parity to survey 9,500 women across the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the U.K. (The billion-dollar beauty business has a growing sponsorship portfolio in women’s sports, from the NWSL to the Professional Women’s Hockey League to a partnership with Billie Jean King.) Just over 5,000 of those women identified as “everyday athletes,” which means they played sports for at least three years before the end of high school or within the past five years. Under 4,000 women never played sports or played less than that; and only 328 women surveyed were pros.
The survey found that everyday athletes share certain qualities compared to the broader population of women in the workforce. Everyday athletes are 37% more likely to aspire to top leadership roles. They’re a whopping 50% more likely to actually hold those leadership roles. And they’re 25% more likely to have negotiated their salaries.
Read more at: https://fortune.com/2026/09/01/women-sports-leadership-survey-elf-beauty-c-suite-business/
