94% of Female C-Suite Leaders Played Sports. Here's What That Number Really Means.
You have seen this number. It is on conference slides, in grant applications, in the opening paragraph of a hundred nonprofit case statements, usually with no source attached:
94% of women in the C-suite played sport.
We use it too. It is on our research page. And we think it is worth explaining what it actually is, because the version that circulates has been detached from its evidence for so long that most people repeating it could not tell you where it came from.
Where the number comes from
It is from an EY Women Athletes Business Network study conducted with espnW, published in 2014. Researchers surveyed more than 400 senior women executives across five countries over roughly three years. Among the C-suite respondents, 94 percent had played sport, and 52 percent had played at university level.
The same research program produced several related findings: 80 percent of female Fortune 500 executives played sport; 74 percent said a sporting background helps accelerate a woman's career; 61 percent credited their own sport participation for their career success.
So the first thing worth saying is that 94 percent is one figure from one study among several, and the Play to Lead literature review cites the same program as finding 90 percent overall and 96 percent for the C-suite. The number that gets quoted everywhere is one of at least three.
What it does not prove
It is correlational. The study asked successful women whether they had played sport. It did not follow a group of girls for thirty years and compare outcomes. Nothing in it establishes that sport caused anybody's career.
The sample is not representative. Four hundred self-selected senior executives is a specific group of people who agreed to answer a survey about their own success. That is not a random sample of women, or of athletes, or of anything.
And the obvious confounder is money. Playing organized sport as a child correlates strongly with family income — in the United States, participation runs at 31.2 percent for children in families below the poverty line and 70.2 percent for those above four times it (National Health Interview Survey, CDC/NCHS). Family income also correlates with the education, the networks and the opportunities that lead to executive careers.
So a statistic showing that executives played sport is partly a statistic showing that executives grew up with money.
Then why do we still use it?
Because a 94 percent figure with those caveats still tells you something real, and it is this: there is no meaningful population of women in senior leadership who did not play.
That is a strong statement even stripped of causation. Whatever the mechanism — the confidence, the comfort with losing, the practice at being coached, the networks, or simply the family circumstances that make both possible — sport and senior leadership travel together almost universally in this cohort
Sport did not put those women in the C-suite. But a great many of the things that did are things sport is unusually good at teaching, and that is worth something.
“Sport did not put those women in the C-suite. But a great many of the things that did are things sport is unusually good at teaching.”
And why the caveats matter more than the number
Here is the practical version. If you believe sport causes leadership, the intervention is to run more programs.
If you believe the correlation is substantially driven by who can afford to play, the intervention is to pay the registration fee.
We think the evidence points at the second, which is why our grants cover unglamorous things — registration, shoes, league dues, travel — rather than leadership curricula. The gap in that 94 percent is not a confidence gap. It is a $115 gap.
What nobody has, including us
The study is eleven years old. There is no Idaho equivalent, no state-level version, and nothing that follows Idaho girls from a first season to a first job.
And we cannot tell you whether our own grants change anybody's career, because the girls we funded this year are eleven. We will not know for twenty years, and we are not going to imply otherwise in the meantime.
We would like there to be. Until there is, we will keep using the 94 percent — and we will keep telling you exactly what it is.
Our research page shows every figure we publish and its source → · $115 funds one season →
