Positively expanding the women's sports ecosystem by design

There are different ways to speak about the growth period women’s sports are experiencing across North America, but there’s no denying it.

Here are just a few indicators of the recent success of women’s sports: 

• Women’s sports are projected to reach $3 billion in total revenue by the end of 2026. This represents a 340% increase from 2022 numbers.  
• Eight new women’s sports leagues have launched in North America since 2020, including Professional Women’s Hockey League, League One Volleyball and Women’s Lacrosse League among others. 
   Viewership of the NCAA Women’s Division 1 Women’s Basketball tournament has been setting all-time records. 
• CPKC Stadium in Kansas City, MO, opened as the world’s first stadium purpose-built for a professional women’s sports team. Home to the NWSL’s Kansas City Current, the venue features women’s specific locker rooms, breastfeeding facilities and top-tier amenities built with female athletes in mind. 
  
• Women’s sports teams are setting new marks for team valuations with the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries leading the way at $1 Billion. 
  
• Athletes like freeskier Eileen Gu, tennis player Coco Gauff and the WNBA’s Caitlin Clark are earning millions in endorsement deals, speaking for brands and organizations alike, and growing their brands. 
  

These are wonderful achievements for women's sports and signal a bright future. And, as these teams, leagues and athletes blaze new trails, the entire ecosystem behind it – youth sports, collegiate scholarships, NIL funding, resource allocation – needs to shift as well. 

Design thinking is one of the best tools we have to drive impact at the ecosystem level. It’s how we turn moments of success into durable movements. In fact, our team is hosting a discussion at this week’s 2026 Social Innovation Summit focused on Catalyzing the Future of Women’s Sports with Lean in Girls and the Women’s National Football Conference, among others. 

Together, the group will focus on how organizations are advancing opportunities for women and girls across all levels of sports, from participation and performance to leadership and visibility – and how the thoughtful design of spaces, systems and experiences can unlock greater access, safety and success for female athletes. The conversation will also highlight the growing intersection of sports, community impact and economic opportunities. 

The conversation is an extension of our company’s larger focus on women’s sports. Beyond our core design work in this space, we’ve also made women’s sports the focus of our 2026 Esri User Conference submittal and recently worked with Intentional Sports to help them envision the women’s sports venues of the future. 

While there’s still much work to do, here are some early trends we see as critical to the future of women’s sports. 

Realize the full social impact of women’s sports

As more girls and women play sports, they are creating positive ripple impacts across their communities. 

First, increased demand for these sports leads to investment in new facilities and/or training areas that expand access to entire communities. Additionally, girls who take part in youth sports also report higher levels of confidence, leadership ability, mental health and career ambition.  

This data paints the full picture of how women’s sports positively impact society. They don’t just create exciting new athletes, leagues and entertainment opportunities – they are helping girls at every age reach new goals in school, life, business and their communities. Sports participation is instilling teamwork and leadership skills that last a lifetime – and reverberate across families and communities. 

Communities that invest in women’s sports assuredly see long-term impacts that make them stronger, equitable, healthier, more educated and more. Strategic design thinking can help communities best think through these downstream consequences and ignite them today. 

Access matters at every age 
Women’s sports still struggle with access at nearly every level, and this is another area ripe for design intervention.  

To be clear, access takes all different forms when we talk about women’s sports: 

• Some communities don’t have leagues and teams set up for girls to become engaged in certain sports. 
   
• Other communities may lack training and competition spaces, forcing girls to constantly schedule around the more ideal practice times for boys or not even play at all.
  
  
• Even at the collegiate and professional level, there is a dearth of adequate training and competition venues for athletes. And sometimes even when women have a space, it isn’t always equitable to their male counterparts.
  
  
• Many colleges and universities don’t have equivalent sponsorship or NIL funding sources to offer female athletes, which trickles down to fewer opportunities. 

The good thing is that access can often be designed, and it’s another area ripe for systems thinking. As one example, the City of Baltimore recently acted on the dangerous reality that many communities don’t have access to swimming and aquatics facilities.  

They chose to respond not with a single space, but an entire ecosystem that will ultimately ensure no community member is more than a walk away from an aquatics space. It’s a systems solution that will save lives, positively reshape communities' relationship with swimming, and foster civic pride. 

Moving forward, we need similar systems solutions for women’s sports. How can we maximize investment beyond a single new facility into projects that change the women’s sports ecosystem. How can the revenue generation success in the professional leagues create new opportunities for young girls just beginning sports? These are the questions we need to address. 

Leave no woman (or girls) behind 
When approaching equitable paths forward for women’s health, we can’t silo the conversation around gender. It’s important that the known positive impacts of women’s sports reaches as many young girls as possible – regardless of race, economic status or geographic location. Already, disparities are beginning to emerge. 

Tackling these challenges will require a coalition and important organizations like Dream Big are helping expand access in American cities while World Youth Clubs focuses on global access expansion. 

Through our Open Hand Studio platform, we recently partnered with World Youth Clubs to support an orphanage in the Dominican Republic that focuses on supporting girls through their teenage years mentally, emotionally and physically. As part of this work, we designed a multi-use sports field and a secure swimming pool to elevate the orphanage’s real focus on well-being and helping these girls thrive. 

Designing athletic spaces with women in mind 
Men and women are undeniably different. Our bodies, our muscle structures, and our hormones don’t function the same way. It’s impossible to accept that truth without then realizing that women’s sports facilities need to be designed differently. Simply making a training facility designed for men available to women doesn’t fully balance the equity ratio. We need more solutions like CPKC Stadium referenced above. 

The design community can design more spaces in this vein but also advocate for similar change across the design ecosystem. We can forge partnerships with institutions like the University of Minnesota Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport and Stanford University’s Female Athlete Science and Translational Research (FASTR) Program that are driving research around women’s physical activity, the science behind their injuries and more. 

The findings from this researcher should inform material selections and create opportunities to talk with material manufacturers about the products they are creating and more broadly test how they impact men’s and women’s health differently. Or the companies designing turf and field solutions – do they know if men and women react the same to their products? How could circadian lighting, temperature control, privacy and more have different impacts on women versus men.  

All of this should be considered in how we think about female-specific spaces in sports, and the design community can help make that happen. 

The women’s sports movement has arrived and it's an exciting time. Where it goes from here though is still unwritten. And today’s success doesn’t guarantee the movement achieves its full potential. That’s where design thinking can play an essential role to ensure tomorrow’s spaces, leagues and realities positively impact as many women and girls as possible.