The motherhood penalty is costing women more than just playing time
Yunus Tuğ/Unsplash
Women in sport at every level — recreational, competitive, elite — face structural barriers that have less to do with ability or interest and everything to do with the systems built around them.
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By now, the WNBA’s rise is not a niche talking point. Record viewership, sellout crowds, a $2.2 billion media deal. People are watching women’s sports in numbers the league has never seen, and the cultural moment feels impossible to dismiss.
And yet the average WNBA salary last season was $102,244. The average NBA salary was $11.9 million. The fans showed up. The ratings showed up. What hasn’t shown up, in any proportion to that, is the pay. A new collective bargaining agreement that took effect this season will bring the average WNBA salary to $583,000 — progress that is real and worth acknowledging, even as the gap with the NBA remains vast enough to still be embarrassing. (Given, well, everything else we know about women and salaries, this isn’t at all a surprise.)
This is the part where someone (generally of the male persuasion) usually says, “Well, the NBA generates more revenue.” Sure, Ted. It also had a 50-year head start, the full backing of the sports establishment, and decades of infrastructure built around the assumption that men’s sports were the only kind worth investing in. Cause and effect are doing a lot of heavy lifting in that argument.
It’s not just basketball
The WNBA is a useful, highly visible example, but the phenomenon it illustrates extends well beyond basketball, beyond professional athletics, and well into the lives of ordinary women who just want to go for a run.
Maybe you ran a half marathon before you had kids and haven’t been able to get back to it since — not because you stopped wanting to, but because training for anything requires childcare, and childcare costs money, and that math doesn’t always work out. Maybe you signed up for a 5K and spent more mental energy arranging coverage for Saturday morning than you did on the actual race. The barrier isn’t motivation. It’s logistics, money, and the low-grade cultural message that your needs are an afterthought in systems that weren’t designed with you in mind.
Women in sport at every level — recreational, competitive, elite — face structural barriers that have less to do with ability or interest and everything to do with the systems built around them. And for mothers specifically, those barriers compound in ways that are financial, logistical, and cultural all at once.
Alysia Montaño, the five-time Olympian who founded For All Mothers+, a nonprofit dedicated to removing the structural barriers that push mothers out of sport and athletic participation, calls this the Motherhood Penalty. The term isn’t new, but her framing of it in an athletic context is sharp. “There is a persistent assumption that once an athlete becomes pregnant or has a child, her ability to perform at an elite level declines,” she says. That assumption translates directly into lost sponsorships, reduced contracts, and fewer invitations to the rooms where decisions get made. At the recreational level, it translates into women quietly dropping out of the sports and fitness communities they built for themselves before kids.
The logistical piece is less glamorous but arguably more grinding. Montaño describes a sports infrastructure built around athletes who are assumed to have no caregiving responsibilities — no lactation spaces, no family accommodations at events, no ranking protections during pregnancy or postpartum recovery. “These aren’t special accommodations,” she says. “They’re the infrastructure that allows mothers to remain fully engaged in sport.”
What “slowing down” actually means
When Montaño competed at the U.S. Track and Field Championships while visibly pregnant, it was treated as extraordinary. The reality she was trying to expose was more mundane: that elite athletes were navigating pregnancy privately and without institutional support, terrified that visibility would cost them contracts. She went on to win a national title at six months postpartum, then again at ten months, then took gold at the World Championships at eight months postpartum. “The dark side of this success,” she says, “is that we were forced to return to competition before we were ready, and had to work ten times harder without support to prove that we were still serious.”
Then there’s the cultural layer, which Montaño argues underlies all of it. Society has long operated on the assumption that when a woman becomes a mother, her ambitions should narrow. She’s heard every version of it. “For generations, women weren’t asked what they wanted, what support they needed, or how they envisioned balancing motherhood with the rest of their lives. Instead, assumptions were made for them.”
She has particular impatience for the idea that motherhood slows women down athletically. “There is no slowing down. We have children and are, in fact, revving up our lives in so many ways.” The narrative of diminishment, she says, has never really been about women’s actual capabilities. “Too often, the assumption that mothers should step back says more about society’s discomfort with supporting women than it does about women’s actual abilities. Society starts to project their fear for mothers onto women — fear of mothers being too fragile, too distracted.”
The answer, in her view, is not lowered expectations. “If you see a mom in distress, it’s because she’s been diminished in all of the avenues that used to or could have supported her wellbeing.” She draws on nature to make the point — not in a soft way, but a pointed one. “When a plant enters a dormant season, we don’t assume it’s finished and pull it from the ground to throw it away. We understand that growth is still happening beneath the surface. Motherhood is much the same. It’s not a story of slowing down. It’s a story of growth, transformation, and potential.”
What it looks like from the inside
For Megan Morant, a WWE personality and now a qualifier for the 2028 Olympic Marathon Trials, the barrier was more immediate. When she applied for a childcare grant through For All Mothers+, she was 12 weeks postpartum. “My entire world had changed, and I was trying to figure out how running fit into my new life,” she says. “To be honest, it was overwhelming and stressful, and I often wondered if maybe this wasn’t the time for me.”
What the $2,000 grant provided wasn’t just money for childcare. Morant is clear about what actually shifted: it was permission. “Someone as inspirational as Alysia Montaño was telling mothers that their goals and dreams still mattered, and as a new mom, I needed to be told, ‘it’s ok.'” A year later, she qualified for the Olympic Trials. “As my daughter gets older,” she says, “I will get to show her that her mom didn’t give up on her dreams.”
The invisible labor Morant describes is something you probably recognize, whether you’re training for the Olympics or just trying to protect a weekday morning workout session. “Every day feels like I’m putting together a puzzle with several missing pieces,” she says. “It’s not only the guilt of being away and prioritizing yourself, but the pre-production that goes into setting aside an hour for yourself to train that exhausts you before the workout even gets started.” If you’ve ever arranged three different people to cover school pickup so you could make it to a yoga class, you know exactly what she means.
What real change requires
What would real change look like? Not grants, or not just grants. Montaño’s answer involves policy — paid family leave, affordable childcare, and comprehensive maternal healthcare as baseline expectations rather than exceptional circumstances. It involves industry, with sponsors and governing bodies treating motherhood as an asset rather than a liability. It involves infrastructure, with lactation spaces and family travel stipends treated with the same matter-of-factness as water stations at a race. “Meaningful systemic change is when mothers no longer have to rely on exceptional support programs to participate fully in sport, work, or public life,” she says.
This year, Strava and For All Mothers+ are awarding 25 athlete moms with $2,000 childcare grants to help make training and competition more accessible. It’s a meaningful intervention in individual lives. It’s also, as Montaño is the first to acknowledge, a workaround for a structural problem. “Success will be when equity for mothers is built into systems by design,” she says, “rather than granted by exception.”
The fans are watching. The question is whether the institutions are.
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