Women Taking it to the Net, in Sports, Health and Life

Last week I was so lucky to be the date of my long-time friend Amy Raimundo at the first winning game of the Golden State Valkyries. This is their first season as a Women’s NBA (WNBA team) and I was completely blown away by what I encountered when I went into the stadium.

Let me set some context by saying that I love watching sports, especially live sports.  Basketball is my favorite, baseball next; but I’ll watch anything that involves people running around after little round objects and banging into each other in a stadium or on a field.  OK, golf, not so much, unless there is a clown head or windmill involved. But give me a good team sport and I am there.   I will wear the gear, I will scream until I’m hoarse, I will eat the crappy food, I will attempt to be caught on the Jumbotron.  Sports=fun for me.  No doubt about it.

For eons women have struggled to make it in professional sports.  The teams are underpaid, under resourced, under-appreciated and the games under-attended.  I remember going to a NY Liberty 10 or so years back and I had a whole row to myself.  As recently as last year the WNBA was sort of meh in terms of attendance.  About 2.3 million fans showed up at games in 2024, which was pretty good compared to about 1.6 million in 2023.  That’s all teams, all games.  The NBA, by contrast, had about 22 million fans that showed up to games live in 2024.  In 2025, the numbers in the WNBA have skyrocketed with about 89% of games at full stadium capacity so far and an increase of about 37% for the first weeks of the season compared to last year.  That is what they call “an inflection point.”

What I saw at the Valkyries game, aka what stood out to me – besides the lavender echo of my own company’s Valkyrie logo, which was awesome – was the sold-out arena.  SOLD OUT.  Chase Center looked exactly like it does when the Warriors are playing at their peak.  In fact, several of the Warriors were in the stands cheering on the Valkyries like they were, well, one of the guys.  It was AWESOME.

People were there from all walks of life and in all shapes, sizes, ages and genders.  It wasn’t a girls’ night out; it was a sporting event writ large.  Right before my eyes women’s sports transformed into sports that happened to include women as the players.  I was thrilled.  It felt like something very meaningful had changed and for that I am grateful.  It’s high time that these athletes get appreciated for what they have accomplished and how generally bad-ass they are, rather than be treated like they are just so cute for trying to be like the guys.  Plus, they are just as much fun to watch as anyone else AND manage to do it all in great hair and makeup.  Can you imagine?

Even I was a little taken aback by how aggressively and violently the Valkyries and the rival team played.  One player, Tiffany Hayes, got her face bashed in during a clearly flagrant foul and bled all over the floor before she was helped off the floor for good.  There were elbows everywhere, full chest bumping (ouch) and a lot of congratulatory butt slapping.  It looked like, well, pro basketball or a day at the Gladiator races. And I loved it.  It was particularly fun to see the crowd, which held just as many men as women, proudly wearing their lavender and gold gear without a care in the world. I don’t see a lot of dudes in lavender out there in the workforce.  Real men wear all the colors.

Of course, there are still big differences between the NBA and the WNBA, as there are between all women’s and men’s professional sports. The average WNBA player salary for the 2024 season was $147,745. This is a hell of a jump from the average salary of $113,000 in 2023. FYI, the league minimum salary is $62,285.  For context, the US poverty line for a family of four was $32,000 in 2024, so the pay for these players who are making their owners and advertisers a boat-load of money is about double that. The highest-paid players in the WNBA can earn around $250,000 annually.  In contrast, the lowest paid NBA player for the 2024-25 season is Tyler Smith, who will earn $1,157,153. Smith is a rookie for the Milwaukee Bucks and he is receiving the league mandated minimum salary.  Perhaps he feels terrible about being at the bottom.  I don’t know about you, but I’d take it.  The average salary in the NBA last year was approximately $12 million.  Let that rattle around in your head for a moment.

The WNBA is expected to garner $1 Billion in revenue in 2025.   That’s one legit Total Addressable Market value.  There are about 156 players in the WNBA.  Guess who is not getting most of that money? The players.  If every single player got the highest pay this year, that would amount to about $39 million.  Out of $1 Billion (that’s 3.9% for you math buffs).  The NBA is expected to have made over $11 Billion in the last season and about $4.6 Billion of that (nearly 42%) went to players.  Women may have made it into the big leagues, but they are still way behind on the income front.  I hope the women aren’t so happy to just be taken seriously that they don’t fight like hell to be treated equally.

But if you can look away from the money side of things (can we? we shouldn’t, but just grant me 2 seconds before you let the outrage seep back in), it is clear sports has made a quantum leap forward when it comes to women.  For starters, people are talking about sports that feature women.  Tara VanDerveer. was celebrated at the game.  Ok, she coached at Stanford, which makes her immediately suspect (Go Bears!), but check this out:  On January 21, 2024, VanDerveer won her 1,203rd game as a head coach at Stanford women’s basketball, passing retired coach Mike Krzyzewski to becoming the winningest head coach in men’s or women’s college basketball history. Now that’s bad-ass.

So, what else does this phenomenon tell us about how things are going? While some people seem to think that we can put women back in their place and bring back a real-life version of The Handmaid’s Tale, I think the girl cat may be out of the cat bag, at least part of the way.  I see some evidence of this in other parts of my existence, and it gives me some lavender-colored hope.  I would look really bad in those Handmaids hats – may hair is way too big.

Another place where I am seeing progress of the two-steps -forward-despite-one-step-back variety: I have learned that when I talk to people about “women’s health” I get a completely different response than when I talk about the “health of women”.  It’s fascinating.  “Women’s Health” has come to mean anything breast- and vagina-related.  That term has become more-or-less-synonymous with what stereotypical men see when they look at women.  Lord Have Mercy.

However, when you instead use the term “health of women,” there seems to be a more open mind about what this might encompass.  The discussion, when re-framed this way, becomes more about all things health that happen to occur with women, including cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, and all manner of problems that afflict people, not just women.

I saw this dynamic actively playing out at the conference I attended just before the Valkyries’ game, the UCSF Rosenman Institute Symposium organized by Christine Winoto.  It was a great conference in many ways, but what I particularly enjoyed was the different kind of conversation that was being had about health in the context of women.  Finally, it was a conversation that focused not on reproductive health first alone, but one that recognized that, oh yeah, women have other organs too – who knew?  It was refreshing, as was the truly diverse mix of speakers of all genders, races, and backgrounds talking on that subject.  Men and women talking openly and broadly about the health of women?  Priceless.  Well done, Rosenman Institute.  The composition of the speakers and the audience and the focus on setting the right tone made for a great conversation all around.

I was fortunate to conduct a roundtable discussion at the Rosenman Symposium about women’s cardiovascular health and decided to close it with an upbeat question after we spent most of the time grumbling.  I asked, “What gives you hope for the future of this field?”  While there were some great answers about new science, new diagnostics and increasing awareness of the role that female biology plays in health differentiation, my answer was a little different than the rest (being my usual out-of-the-box self).  What gives me hope in the healthcare world, and every other part of the world that I live in, is that women are poised to control a whole lot of the money in the United States.

Economists and bankers are pretty confident that The Great Wealth Transfer (look it up – it’s a thing) will result in somewhere between $84 Trillion and $120 Trillion in wealth being transferred to heirs.  And about 60% of that is expected to go to women, resulting in the greatest economic boost for women in history and a major shift in the balance of economic power.  If women control the wallet, they will control the agenda for philanthropy and for policy (lobbying dollars gotta come from somewhere).  While this is not going to happen tomorrow (the Great Wealth Transfer happens through 2048), it is going to happen.  That gives me hope.  Maybe not for me so much, but for my daughter and for her future children.  As was famously said during my favorite dramatic movie, All the President’s Men, “Follow the Money.” Yep.

Notably, this week I co-hosted an event with a few awesome friends, Susan Solinsky and Anna Zornosa, where showed the documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still.  The documentary, which I saw at the Mill Valley Film Festival and which blew me away, tells the story of Iceland’s historic Women’s Day Off, which occurred October 24, 1975. According to Pamela Hogan and Hrabba Gunnarsdóttir, the filmmakers, “this year marks the 50^th anniversary of the day that 90% of Iceland’s women—completely fed up with being disregarded, underpaid, and unrecognized in the workplace and in the home—walked out of their homes and off the job, bringing the country to its knees and sparking a revolution that’s continued to this day.” There was a great deal of discussion in the movie to highlight that the women weren’t seeking to take power from men, just to share it equally, to get valued equally and to have the right to self-determination in all things career, home and financial.  Seems reasonable.  If you disagree with that statement, take a hard look at yourself and look up the word “reasonable” in the dictionary.  You will not find your picture there.  Here’s the movie trailer.

And, as the filmmakers told me when they so graciously agreed to let me borrow the as-yet-unreleased film, “How perfect is it that in this milestone anniversary year, women are virtually running Iceland! The president, the prime minister, the Mayor of Reykjavik, 7 of 11 cabinet members, the police commissioner, the Bishop of Iceland, and the heads of the three political parties in government are all women!.”  Notably, one of the women who started the Womens Day Off Movement, who was told she could not captain a ship because she was a girl, found out that she COULD become President of Iceland (for 16 years!).  Another, who was told girls can’t become lawyers, went on to become the first female Chief Justice of the Iceland Supreme Court. This is what happens when the Powerpuff Girls unite – great things can move forward, and glaciers can become rivers of opportunity (gratuitous nod to Iceland weather).

This movement started with a bunch of regular women sitting around and deciding to act to change the world.  They did it with great organization, communication, heart and humor.  It’s good advice to act on the good things you believe in and it’s great to see some of that happening in the U.S., with regular people working hard to fight good fights to ensure that we don’t take two steps back.  One is already too many.  Hey, what are all you gals doing later this month? Maybe we should meet up?

Ps – for a similarly inspirational movie about women moving the ball (or boat) forward, check out this one, Maiden.  https://venturevalkyrie.com/tales-of-the-sea-for-female-entrepreneurs-a-maiden-voyage/