Sport Science on Women, Women in Sport Science

As I, Iñigo Mujika, write these words, I have just completed the third week of an altitude training camp in Sierra Nevada, Spain (2320 m) in preparation for the 18th FINA World Championships to be held in Gwangju, South Korea, from July 12 to 28, 2019. As usual in a situation like this, I am providing sport physiology support to elite athletes, including some Olympic and world champions. The only “special” thing about this particular training camp is that a large majority of the athletes I am working with are women: pool swimming, 2 women; open-water swimming, 2 women and 4 men; and water polo, 22 women. As I look back on my career in sport physiology, I realize that I have often had the opportunity to work with elite women athletes. Indeed, my very first scientific article as a PhD student reported, “The subjects of this study were 18 national and international level swimmers, 10 males and 8 females.”1 In my second PhD study, however, we wanted to look at hormonal variations during periods of intensive training and tapering, and although we still had access to the same group of swimmers, we chose to study only men: “Eight highly-trained national and international level male swimmers participated in this study.”2 As far as I can remember, the only reason to exclude women from the investigation was that “female hormones were too complicated.” Nevertheless, and setting aside the times I worked in professional cycling and professional football, primarily with male athletes, I have closely worked indistinctively with both women and men in various endurance and team sports, either as a sport physiologist or as a coach, and never thought twice about the fact that it was women I was working with—just elite athletes . . . period. My involvement with elite women athletes on the field, however, did not translate into a balanced ratio of scientific papers on female and male athletes. Indeed, on review, only 6% of my scientific studies involved exclusively female athletes (soccer and water polo players, synchronized swimmers, and a female triathlete), whereas about 23% included both female and male participants. A similar trend can be observed by looking at the first 5 issues of the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance (IJSPP) published in 2019: Only 19% of all original investigations and brief reports included female subjects, and a meager 4% were exclusively performed on female athletes: 2 studies were conducted on synchronized swimmers (now ca