Gender Inequities in Sports and ACL Injury Risk

Why the standard measure of athletic injury rates may be built on a gendered blind spot — based on a 2024 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Key terms

Access the Youtube video here.

  • The standard unit sports scientists use to measure playing/training time, typically defined as one athlete participating in one practice or one competition; injury rates are calculated as injuries per AE.

  • The proportion of an athlete's total playing time spent in practice versus in competitive matches. Because injuries are more likely during matches than practice, a lower ratio of practice-to-match time can inflate injury rates independent of any biological factor.

  • A term the GenderSci Lab uses to signal that gender and sex are deeply entangled and often cannot be cleanly separated in observed health data.

  • Patterns of unequal investment, resourcing, and institutional support for women's athletics that shape athletes' training conditions long before any injury occurs.

Discussion Questions

  1. Before watching, what explanation would you have given for why women's ACL injury rates are reported as higher than men's? Did the video change your thinking?

  2. Explain in your own words how "team size" and "training-to-match ratio" can distort an injury rate statistic even if the raw number of injuries is accurate.

  3. The video connects this research to broader patterns of underinvestment in women's sport. What other measurable "downstream" effects might that underinvestment produce?

  4. If you were advising a sports federation on how to fairly compare injury rates across genders, what data would you want collected that isn't currently standard?

  5. How does this case study illustrate the difference between a "biological" explanation and a "gender/sex entangled" explanation for a health outcome?

Suggested Readings

  1. Danielsen, A. C., Gompers, A., Bekker, S., & Richardson, S. S. (2024). Limitations of athlete-exposures as a construct for comparisons of injury rates by gender/sex: A narrative review. British Journal of Sports Medicine, bjsports-2024-108812.

  2. Pape M. (2025). Gender/Sex Entanglement, Structural Sexism, and Injury: The Case of Australian Rules Football. American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council, 37(7), e70096.

  3. Homan, P. (2019). Structural Sexism and Health in the United States: A New Perspective on Health Inequality and the Gender System. American Sociological Review, 84(3), 486-516.

  4. Reading 4…

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Yes — no prior background in sports medicine or anatomy is required. It works well as a stand-alone assignment in intro gender studies, sports sociology, public health, or 'gender and medicine' courses.

  • Sports medicine and epidemiology, kinesiology, sociology of sport, science & technology studies (STS), public health, and gender studies.

  • No — the research doesn't dispute that reported rates differ. It argues that the measurement tool used to calculate those rates (athlete-exposures) has structural blind spots that likely inflate the size of the gap, and that biological explanations alone don't fully account for it.

  • The paper suggests disaggregating practice time from match time, tracking individual-level exposure, and accounting for team size (rather than relying on a single pooled number that treats a practice and a competitive match as equivalent risk).

  • The core critique applies broadly across sports where women's programs have historically had smaller rosters and lower practice-to-match ratios. The research has been discussed in the context of the 2026 Winter Olympics and women's sport more broadly.

Suggested Citations

SUGGESTED VIDEO CITATION

GenderSci Lab. (2026). Gender Inequities in Sports and ACL Injury Risk [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmLvDu26Byg.

SUGGESTED WEBPAGE CITATION

GenderSci Lab. (2026). Gender inequities in sports and ACL injury risk. https://www.genderscilab.org/gender-inequities-in-sports-and-acl-injury-risk.