Self-esteem for women in sports starts to shift at a certain age: the age a girl stops just playing and starts being looked at. The sport is the same. What changes is that her body becomes something to judge, not only something to use.
A lot of self-esteem goes missing right there. In sport, a woman’s body is both the instrument and the thing on display, and those two jobs rarely sit together in peace. This is about what that does to how a woman sees herself, and where she can set it down.
The age the judging starts
The drop-off is measurable. Canadian Women & Sport found that about one in three girls who play sport leave it by their late teens, while boys drop out at closer to one in ten. The decline picks up around age 16.
It isn’t that girls lose interest, not at all. It’s what starts getting said. In the same research, two in five girls reported that comments about their appearance or clothing affected whether they kept playing, and one in three said comments about their bodies undermined their confidence.
If a girl is good at something and she’s worked hard at it, and then people start making comments about her body while she does it, and judging it, she stops feeling comfortable and she leaves. It was never that she lost interest in the sport. It’s that she stopped being able to do it without feeling judged, and the fear and discomfort of that judgment took all the joy out of it. That isn’t moving on from a hobby. That’s being judged out of one, worn down and too scared of the judgment to keep going.
“Good for a girl” is something most women in sports have been told
‘Good for a girl’ is a compliment with a catch. It hands you praise and quietly takes some of it back. Told that enough times, a girl learns to take the edge off her own wins before anyone else can.
Then you start saying it about yourself. ‘Yeah, I know, I’m good for a girl,’ as if that part belongs there. It doesn’t. You’re good. You’re a good athlete, you’re fast, you’re strong, whatever it is in your sport. Good, full stop.
But feeling good enough is the thing a lot of women never get to have. The story handed to them is that they can’t measure up to men, so the bar sits somewhere they aren’t meant to reach. In some sports, at the very top, the physical gap is real. In plenty of others, women and men line up together and women win. Not against the best man in the field, maybe, but against plenty of men. So it was never only good for a girl. It was good. The qualifier is what teaches girls that their wins don’t quite count, and that they’re never quite enough.
The same logic runs under ‘nobody watches women’s sports.’ Except the watching part turned out to be wrong. In the United States, Nielsen reported that women’s sports drew 28.6 billion viewing minutes in the first half of 2026, up 18 percent year over year, with more than half the population now saying they follow it. The audience was there. The story that it wasn’t did its damage anyway.
When your accomplishment is always measured against someone else’s, and the comparison is rigged, your own worth never adds up. Men and women don’t usually compete in the same category. We don’t compare a 20-year-old athlete to a 50-year-old one either. Both can be great. We just don’t line them up against each other. So why do we do it to men and women without thinking? Somewhere along the way, society decided that was normal.
Being looked at for women in sports
This isn’t only an elite-athlete problem. It reaches any woman who has tried to exercise in front of other people.
In a survey by Fitrated, 65 percent of women said they avoid the gym out of fear of being judged, compared with 36 percent of men. Many describe the same specific thing: being watched in a mixed gym, feeling their body assessed between sets, deciding it isn’t worth it.
Women get looked at and judged in a way most men never do. And it isn’t only men doing the looking. Women watch women too, or it feels that way, which is its own kind of discomfort. The gym can build confidence, but if walking in already feels like being assessed, a lot of women never get the chance to build it. They just walk away and stop.
The body you’re told to have
Two pictures compete for a girl’s sense of what an athletic woman looks like. One comes from her feed: filtered, thin, still. The other is an actual athlete: muscular, sweating, built for a task.
The feed usually wins, because it’s everywhere and the athlete is on once every four years. Women in Sport found that 43 percent of girls who once saw themselves as sporty no longer do by the end of their teens, against 24 percent of boys, with many saying they feel judged on how they look.
So a girl ends up apologizing for the exact body her sport gave her. Strong reads as too much. You get told ‘you don’t look like you work out that much,’ or ‘how are you not thinner if you train so much?’ The message is that an athletic woman has to look a particular way. And no matter what you look like, someone has a comment. Too big, too thin, or something else. The scrutiny never lets up. The body was never the problem. The problem is the picture women are handed to measure it against. We stopped seeing our bodies for what they can do and started grading them on how they look, by whatever score other people give.
When it goes quiet
For some women, this doesn’t stay at the level of confidence. It settles into their relationship with food. Meals stop being simple and eating becomes something to manage, or to feel uneasy about. The body turns into a problem to solve rather than a self to live in.
This is more common in sport than people assume, and more common in sports that reward being lean. A 2024 review found that women athletes reported disordered eating at notably higher rates than non-athletes. Disordered eating means a strained, preoccupying relationship with food and body. It can sit well below a formal diagnosis and still take a real toll. It doesn’t always look like the obvious thing, either. Often it’s quieter than people expect, more about unease than anything dramatic, which is part of why it can go unnamed for a long time.
If any of this is close to home, you don’t have to work out whether it counts first. NEDIC, the National Eating Disorder Information Centre, runs a free Canadian helpline and chat.
A different measure
Self-esteem built on how you look, or on other people’s approval, is a shaky foundation. It moves every time the feedback moves. The steadier version is built on things that hold: what your body can do, what you value, how you treat people, what you’re working toward. Who you are was never going to be defined by what you look like. It’s defined by what you value and how you carry yourself when no one’s keeping score.
That’s learnable. It’s a lot of what therapy is for: noticing the voice that says ‘good for a girl,’ working out whose voice it really is, and slowly not believing it. None of this is a diagnosis or a substitute for care. It’s a place to start.
When you’re ready, the first step at The Dot is a free 20-minute video call with a therapist you choose. You decide what happens after.
We’re here if you need help
At The Dot, we offer free consultations for anyone in Canada considering therapy. We’ll go through your questions and concerns and help you find the right therapist for what you’re dealing with. Does everybody need therapy? No. But if you’re curious about working with someone who specializes in EMDR and trauma, that curiosity is worth pursuing. Book Your Free Consultation Visit our therapist match form to let us match you with the right therapist for your needs.
Sources:
- Canadian Women & Sport, Rally Report. Girls’ sport participation, dropout, and body-related comments.
- Nielsen, via Reuters (2026). US women’s sports viewership growth.
- Fitrated survey, via NBC News. Women and fear of being judged at the gym.
- Women in Sport, via University of Surrey research. Girls disengaging from sport in their teens.
- Disordered eating in athletes, 2024 meta-analysis (PMC). Prevalence among athletes.
- NEDIC. National Eating Disorder Information Centre, Canadian helpline.
