While the world cheers for breakout stars like Caitlin Clark, a quieter crisis is happening on local playing fields: girls are dropping out of sports at twice the rate of boys by age 14. This isn’t a lack of talent—it’s a systemic exit triggered by perfectionism, puberty, and the “taboo” of changing bodies.
As we approach International Women’s Day and the NCAA tournament, we sat down with Nicole Johnston, CEO and author of Taboo Topics: Things Women Should Talk About, But Don’t, to discuss why this “participation crater” is actually a leadership drain. With research showing that 69% of high-earning women in leadership roles played competitive sports, Nicole reveals how the lessons learned on the court—resilience, risk-taking, and failing forward—are the exact tools women need to shatter glass ceilings later in life. —Noa Nichol
You mention that girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys by age 14; what is the “silent” cost to the economy and our future corporate boardrooms when 70% of potential female leaders leave the playing field before high school?
The silent cost is that a majority of potential future women leaders are being removed or remove themselves from the earliest system that teaches strategic confidence at scale. First, sports compounds confidence, as it is repeated exposure to visibility (being watched), evaluation (scores), feedback (coaching), and recovery (next play). If girls exit right as stakes rise (puberty + competition), they miss the normalizing of “I can be seen, criticized, and still belong.”
Second, they miss out on developing muscles around risk tolerance. Corporate leadership rewards people who will take a shot, miss, iterate, and stay in the arena. Early sport exit often means fewer reps of public imperfection with persistence—a muscle boardrooms quietly require. Third, is the economic drag. Fewer women staying in the leadership pipeline = less diverse decision-making, slower innovation, and a narrower set of sponsors/mentors for the next generation. The cost isn’t only wages—it’s lost enterprise value from homogenous risk-taking and missed markets.
You’ve noted that boys are taught to “try again” while girls are taught to “get it right.” How does this obsession with perfectionism specifically manifest on the court or field, and how does it translate to the way women later negotiate salaries or take risks in their careers?
On the court/field, perfectionism tends to look like playing not to lose vs playing to win. Girls will pass up shots, avoid aggressive plays, make “safe” decisions to reduce error. I remember in a high school basketball game, we were down by 1 point with less than a minute left. Two of the three main shooters wouldn’t take the shot. They kept passing it to the other person. They didn’t want to be the one who potentially missed. Girls also over-index on coach approval. They perform for external validation rather than for intrinsic validation and learning through experimentation. Finally, girls will turn mistakes into catastrophes. For example, one turnover becomes “I shouldn’t be here.”
Career translation is painfully direct and measurable in advancement and pay. For salary negotiation, women may anchor on being “reasonable” or “fair” instead of strategic, avoiding bold asks because an imperfect ask feels like a moral failure. I have many times hired women at pay higher than their ask, because they didn’t know their own worth. For promotions, women wait to be 90–100% ready before applying, while men often apply at a lower readiness threshold because they’ve had more permission (socially and behaviorally) to “try again.” Finally, it manifest as an aversion to visibility. If perfection = safety, then visibility = threat. That’s how high-performing women become “reliable” but not “leadership material.”
Puberty and periods are often the “taboo” catalysts for leaving sports. How can coaches and parents change the conversation from one of shame and “disappearing” to one of physical power and body literacy?
The move is from secrecy management to performance management. As a society, we must normalize the language around menstruation. Coaches can transparently acknowledge that cycles affect energy, thermoregulation, cramps, mood, sleep—so the team needs to plan like pros. When adults speak plainly, shame loses oxygen. We also have to help girls build body literacy skills: Teach girls to track sleep, hydration, pain, fueling, stress—cycle included—so they learn “my body gives data” not “my body is a problem.” Third, we need to create practical safety nets. Girls need access to products, private restroom breaks, and uniform options. Each time I see a women’s team playing in white uniforms, I question that choice. Quiet logistic choices can remove loud shame.
And yes, public honesty from elite athletes helps. Amber Glenn speaking about competing while menstruating breaks the “silent suffering” pattern and gives girls a script that isn’t apology. Both Sue Bird (WNBA) and Megan Rapinoe (USA Soccer) discussed how they each tore their ACL while menstruating, point out an opportunity to understand how season/career ending injuries can be tied back to menstruation.
There is a staggering statistic that 69% of women in high-earning leadership roles played competitive sports. In your coaching experience, what is the one specific “sports skill”—resilience, losing gracefully, or strategic play—that women struggle most to replicate if they didn’t play as girls?
There’s a well-cited stat from a Deloitte survey: among women earning $100K+ in management/leadership roles, 69% played competitive sports.
The hardest skill to replicate later, in my experience coaching executives, is recovery speed after a miss (emotional + strategic).
Not just “resilience” as grit—the tempo of resilience. In sport, you have to respond within seconds to the play. In corporate, it is easy to ruminate, overthink, and start a perfection spiral.
Athletes more often treat it as data + adjustment, while women without a sports background often internalize “I made an error = I am the error.”
We are currently witnessing the “Caitlin Clark effect.” Why has it taken so long for the world to catch up to the talent that has always been there, and how do we ensure this isn’t just a “moment” but a shift in the systemic drop-off?
Watching the “Caitlin Clark effect” is fascinating from the point of view of someone who grew up in the same area of Iowa, went to the same university, but played a completely different game. In addition to the obvious, needed investment, it is necessary to go back to inflection points and dissect why drop-outs occur. We must invest in middle school sports for girls. If we only fund the superstars, we lose too much potential. We also need to identify and stop the factors that accelerate the drop-out like around body shaming, harassment, etc. Finally, media consistency is critical. Until girls see the possibilities that exist for them, girls will continue to go the safe route and drop out.
You recount a childhood story of a classmate being shamed for her period at age nine. How do these early “lessons in silence” create the “imposter syndrome” many executive women face decades later in the workplace?
Period shaming teaches girls early that their body is inconvenient, you should hide what is happening and not to make others uncomfortable. That shame leads directly to masking behaviors later in life. Those masks result in not asking for what you need, over-preparing so no one can question you, and fearing that exposure on anything (a gap, a question, a boundary) will trigger exclusion. Sometimes imposter syndrome isn’t driven by self-doubt, it can be learned self-silencing due to responses from others.
For the parent of a 12-year-old girl who wants to quit her team because she’s “not good enough” or feels “awkward,” what is the one question they should ask her to help her stay in the game?
First and foremost, make it a conversation. Ask, “What would need to be true or you to stay? What could we change to make it better?” Then offer suggestions that she can choose from to help your daughter regain control and agency. The suggestions could include team environment, discussion on the coach, body comfort (uniforms, food, etc.) or skill confidence gap and building a plan to meet it.
The goal is to shift the thinking from her identity being bad to instead address the problem of what needs to change so you can belong and grow.
Your book, Taboo Topics, explores things women don’t talk about. Why is the link between “STEM persistence” and “sports participation” one of those hidden topics, and why should we be treating these two fields as part of the same leadership pipeline?
Because both are domains of repeated failure + iteration under observation. STEM persistence requires confusion tolerance, hypothesis testing, being wrong publicly (labs, problem sets), yet continuing to learn. Sports requires tolerating misses, adjusting technique, adapting to confrontation—often while people watch.
When girls leave sports at puberty, they often lose one of the earliest safe failure ecosystems. We’re then surprised when they self-select out of advanced STEM pathways that demand the same psychological reps that sports builds. This is why I treat them as parallel confidence engines, not separate extracurriculars.
In 2026, we have more visibility for female athletes than ever before—but are we still holding them to a “perfection standard” that we don’t demand from male athletes?
Yes—and the double-bind is sharper under visibility. Let’s look at the language. Describing a performance for a woman reflects a narrower margin for error (“collapse,” “choke,” “disappointing”) where men get “off night.” Focus is placed much higher on the aesthetic, with a likability tax layered onto performance. Finally, woman also have moral expectations (be inspiring, grateful, role-model-perfect) that men aren’t required to carry at the same intensity. When the audience is bigger, the perfection demand can get louder unless coverage norms change.
If we could magically keep every girl in sports until age 18, how would the landscape of female leadership change by the time those girls hit their 30s?
That would be a team I would love to lead!! You’d see a cohort of women entering their 20s and 30s with higher “visibility tolerance” (presenting, pitching, leading meetings), faster recovery cycles (setback → reset → next move), more comfort with competition (not personalizing rivalry), stronger sponsorship dynamics (athletes learn early to seek coaches, advocates, and strategic feedback), with a bigger leadership bench for boards and executive roles—because the pipeline would be fed by women who stayed in “high-stakes learning” environments longer.
In boardroom terms: more women who can play offense without apologizing, because they practiced it for years.
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