Unaesthetic: Why the Surest Path to Recognition for Women Athletes Still Runs through How They Look

At this year’s WNBA Draft, something remarkable happened on the orange carpet. For the first time, rising stars arrived dressed by the likes of Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Coach — luxury fashion houses that had never before invested in dressing players for the league’s signature event. The moment was celebrated as proof that women’s basketball had finally arrived as a cultural force.

And it had. But the fanfare also revealed something more complicated: that the surest path to mainstream recognition for female athletes still runs through aesthetics. The women who play this game at the highest level were making news not for their stats, but for their style. It’s progress — and it’s also a trap.

I’ve been playing field hockey and lacrosse for seven years. Female athletes, in my experience, were never a novelty. They were just athletes. But even within that world, I’ve noticed unspoken rules about how women are supposed to compete. Visible displays of anger or passion — common currency in men’s sports — can get a woman dismissed as dramatic, classless, or unhinged. We can be the best players on the field and still be expected to maintain feminine composure at all times: gracious in victory, composed in defeat, photogenic throughout.

The WNBA Draft’s fashion moment is a genuine milestone. This year’s orange carpet marked a notable shift from previous years, when disparities in access to stylists and sponsorship money were often visible among draftees. But it’s worth asking: why is it that the league’s most visible cultural breakthrough in years is about what the players wore? 

The answer lies in a history that runs deeper than basketball. When women competed at the Olympic Games for the first time in 1900, they were permitted only in sports deemed socially appropriate — tennis, croquet, golf. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who had relaunched the modern Olympics four years earlier with women excluded entirely, declared that female participation would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and improper.” The word “unaesthetic” has never quite left the building.

For centuries, women were actively discouraged from strenuous physical activity. Aristotle’s followers believed women had a limited reserve of bodily energy — energy siphoned entirely to reproduction. Any athletic exertion, the thinking went, threatened fertility and thus a woman’s fundamental value. As the National Women’s History Museum notes, “public athletic performance by women and girls was condemned as immodest, selfish, and attention-seeking.” Sport was tied to class as well as gender: “nice” women (white, upper-class) did not exert themselves. Only servants and factory workers could be permitted physical strain — in service to someone else.

Title IX changed the legal landscape in 1972, prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded educational programs. Women’s sports gained access, funding, and eventually massive audiences. Since 2019, media coverage of women’s sports has tripled. The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup drew nearly 2 billion viewers. The 2024 Paris Olympics achieved full gender parity in athlete participation for the first time in Olympic history.

And yet the behavioral double standard persists. Caitlin Clark — who broke the NCAA scoring record for all genders in 2024, a record held by Pete Maravich since 1970 — has been repeatedly called “whiny” and “overdramatic” for on-court intensity that would read as fire and passion in any male player. Her base WNBA salary was $76,535. Her NBA draft counterpart Zaccharie Risacher’s starting offer was $12.6 million. She’s the face of women’s basketball and makes roughly 2% of the median NBA salary.

The behavioral expectations imposed on women athletes shape more than sports. They shape how girls understand ambition, confidence, and competition in every domain. When aggression and intensity are celebrated in men as signs of passion and commitment, the same traits in women read as excessive and unsportsmanlike. Is it any wonder that women’s sports are sometimes called “less competitive”? The league that teaches women to shrink cannot then complain that the game seems smaller.

The motherhood penalty compounds this. Male athletes are rarely asked to choose between career and family. Elite women athletes with families number three to four times fewer than their male counterparts. Eleven-time Olympic track medalist Allyson Felix faced contract clauses and pay cuts from sponsors after her pregnancy.

Back to that orange carpet. It’s genuinely good that Coach and Chanel see these athletes as worth dressing. The players looked extraordinary. But the culture will have arrived when Caitlin Clark’s crossover gets as much airtime as her outfit — when what she does matters more than how she looks doing it.

That shift begins with awareness: noticing the biases not only in the world around us but in ourselves. Even as an athlete, I still feel a flicker of surprise when a woman plays loud and physical and unrestrained. That reaction says nothing about her and everything about what we’ve all been taught to expect.

The orange carpet is just a start. When we can cheer for a woman’s athletic excellence — regardless of likeability, regardless of aesthetics — that will be progress worth celebrating. 

Juliet Schwartz is a senior at Newark Academy.