Want to increase your chances, or perhaps your child’s odds, of one day becoming a female CEO? Sign up for high school football, gymnastics, tennis (or any sports team for that matter), pronto.
That’s because when it comes to the few women who actually make it to the top, there’s one striking pattern they all share.
“The only correlation they can find of women in the C suite, the CEO spot, it that they all played sport—or the majority played sport,” Melinda French Gates recently explained at the Power of Women’s Sports Summit presented by e.l.f. Beauty.
“And the thesis is (we don’t know why that is) they didn’t mind failing,” the 60-year-old billionaire philanthropist and ex-wife of Bill Gates added.
“You step out of bounds playing soccer, you go right back to it. You lose the tennis match sometimes. You learn to fail and that failing is okay.”
Tennis legend Billie Jean King, who was also on the panel, echoed that girls who play sports growing up go on to have more self-confidence, more resilience and do better in math and science—even if they’re just playing to participate, not win.
“That’s why I want girls in sports,” she added. “They don’t have to be best.”
“In fact, have you heard of Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut? I grew up with her in the Los Angeles area,” the 81-year-old champion said, adding that Ride similarly played tennis competitively until her early 20s.
Just a few years after walking away from her dream of going pro in tennis, she came across a groundbreaking 1977 NASA ad: the first ever to call for female astronauts.
“She was a physicist, she was brilliant, she was always number one in class,” King recalled. “So she signed up to be a woman astronaut, and of course, she got picked to be the first American woman.”
“But she told me the reason she got picked was because she’d been a jock. She said, ‘I got along better, I understood the male society better, because I’ve been in sports and I knew their language. I know that’s the reason I got chosen first, because I had sports in my life,’ and so I just that’s one example of what sports can do for you as a person.”
Gates, King, and Ride aren’t imagining it. Jocks really do turn out to be more successful. An extensive study of U.S. Ivy League alumni has shown that those who were consumed with sports—not books—in their youth go on to land more senior positions and high salaries than their “nerdy” peers
It isn’t a coincidence: The leadership qualities cultivated on the playing field, are precisely the ones needed in the boardroom.
