‘You put the top on and your life is sucked out of you’: The fight to change women’s sports uniforms

Sports phenom Erin Phillips (center, No. 4) has spoken out about the bodysuits that the Australian basketball team had to wear. (Credit: Kent Smith/NBAE/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

When Olympian Tess Howard put on her new uniform for Great Britain’s women’s field hockey team in 2021, she felt something she hadn’t expected at the height of her athletic career: embarrassment.

The compression tank top and short, snug skort were meant to be performance wear. Instead, the top was too tight and low-cut, and both pieces were physically restricting Howard’s and her teammates’ movement and breathing.

“You put the top on, and your life is sucked out of you,” said Howard, recalling the skort actually made it more difficult to run. “Before games, we were all stretching it over the backs of chairs in the locker room, trying to make it fit differently.”

When she surveyed her teammates, nearly all 20 of them told Howard they wanted the uniform changed, and most said they had “so much body consciousness and anxiety around” the uniforms.

“I was playing for my country — I shouldn’t be this uncomfortable,” the Olympian said.

It’s not just elite women athletes whose uniforms make them feel awkward and uneasy. By age 16, nearly two-thirds of girls in the United Kingdom have lost interest in sports — citing fear of judgment and a lack of confidence as two of the main reasons. Sports uniforms are a contributing factor. In the United States, girls drop sports at a rate about twice that of boys.

Howard and her team got the company to redesign the uniform after about a year of trying, swapping the constricting top for a looser one. For Howard, it was a turning point. “That’s when I realized it doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.

At the Paris Olympics, she got the team to offer shorts as an option in addition to the skort — and she became the first woman Olympic field hockey player to score in shorts. Her story garnered public attention, and changes large and small followed, including Irish Camogie players winning the right to wear shorts after boycotting play and the French Gymnastics Federation allowing shorts over leotards for gymnasts.

Howard used her experience as impetus for her studies, publishing her dissertation at Durham University in the U.K. on gendered uniforms and girls’ participation in sport. Her published research found that lack of choice in uniform design was a significant reason girls dropped out of athletics during puberty.

She also went on to win for England in the Commonwealth Games in 2022 and to the quarterfinals for Team GB in the Paris Olympics in 2024 — in shorts. The U.K. government has also changed its national rules around sports uniforms for middle and high school students to include more choice.

An uncomfortable display

Howard’s experience isn’t an isolated one. Whether it’s teenage gymnasts, university-level swimmers or professional soccer players, women across sports have long been told that their uniforms should be “flattering,” a euphemism for revealing — even when it negatively affects performance or health.

The retired Australian basketball and football star Erin Phillips blamed her team’s “skin-tight, leave-nothing-to-the-imagination Opals bodysuit uniform” for sexualizing players instead of supporting their performance.

“I was super self-conscious wearing that uniform,” she said in an interview. Even at the peak of her career in the demanding sport, Phillips said she started taking diet pills and wasn’t eating properly because she felt so much pressure to look a certain way.

If professional adult women athletes feel this way, would vulnerable teenage girls feel the same? Psychologist Jane Ogden decided to find out, interviewing 20 former athletes to start learning why so many teenage girls abandon sports during puberty.

Her June study, titled “You’re Basically Naked,” revealed a recurring theme: uniforms that were too tight and too small, leaving the teen athletes worried about how their bodies looked. (There were other factors too, but problematic uniforms was a big issue.)

“In sports like ballet, gymnastics and swimming, once puberty hits, those tight leotards and costumes make girls feel incredibly exposed — body hair, periods, body shape changes — all of it suddenly feels on display,” Ogden said.

Just as it does for older, professional athletes, that exposure collides with unrealistic ideals of how an athlete should look.

“There’s this sense that you’re supposed to be muscly and fit, but also small and contained,” Ogden said. “The uniforms seem stuck in an age where women still have to look traditionally sexy while doing their sport — like they were designed for a beauty pageant, not performance.”

For example, Zara, a gymnast, described to Ogden’s research team how she felt wearing her leotard: “Those leotards show every detail like curves and bumps … so it’s difficult to wear such tight pieces, in general, let alone when you’re in awkward positions that you do in gymnastics.”

It’s pressure like this that has caused some girls to drop out of sports altogether.

Pressure to eat less leads to under fueling

The fallout from ill-fitting uniforms isn’t just psychological; it has real physiological effects, too.

When athletes feel constant pressure to meet to look “lean” or “light,” they often end up under fueling and hurting their performance.

Case in point: A 2024 study of over 1,000 marathoners (546 women and 484 men) debunked the old “lighter is faster” myth. Runners who under fueled (called low energy availability, or LEA) were slower and faced a nearly threefold higher risk of major medical issues during the Boston Marathon. The key predictor of performance wasn’t weight — it was fueling.

Over 40 per cent of women marathoners had LEA, compared with fewer than 20 per cent of the men, according to the study led by Dr. Kristin Whitney, a sports physician and co-medical director of the Boston Marathon, and Dr. Kate Ackerman of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Consistent LEA can lead to RED-S: relative energy deficiency in sports, a condition where “the athlete is under consuming food calories relative to the amount of energy they are expending for exercise,” said Dr. Anthony Hackney, a professor emeritus of exercise endocrinology at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health.

The condition leads to hormone depletion in both men and women, but in women that loss of estrogen means disrupted menstrual cycles, loss of immune system function, weaker bones, and of course, negative effects on performance for all.

Hackney, who helped write the International Olympic Committee’s 2023 guidelines on RED-S, said he has seen the condition occur in team sports, but it’s most common in athletes who run triathlons and marathons, or play any sport with weight classes, such as karate or wrestling. He also sees RED-S in sports in which there are strong cultural expectations.

“There is no weight category in gymnastics, but what do we expect our gymnasts to look like?” he said.

Bailey Kowalczyk, an elite endurance runner, knows that firsthand. Told by coaches that she’d run faster if she weighed less, she restricted food until her body broke down. She lost her period, had bone stress fractures and saw her performance plummet — the opposite of what she had been promised.

Now in recovery, she is part of a growing movement of women athletes who proudly talk about “making periods cool” — reframing menstruation as a sign of proper fueling, not weakness.

Hackney said he still sees a lot of misinformation coming from coaches, like Kowalczyk experienced, and better education on RED-S is needed. “I think we’re getting better, but we still have a long way to go,” he said.

Tess Howard and other women athletes who’ve had it with body image undermining their ability to compete continue to work for change.

Howard has recently founded Inclusive Sportswear in the U.K., and she’s partnered with ASICS to launch the “Undropped Kit.” It’s a reimagined uniform for physical education class, designed with sweat-concealing, period-safe fabrics and flexible fits. It gives girls the freedom to choose shorts, leggings or looser tops — small design changes that mean choice and flexibility, and the ability to participate in sports without feeling uncomfortable.

The focus should be on keeping an athlete’s head in the game, she said, not on their gear.

“Girls don’t need to be told what to wear,” Howard said. “They just need options that let them focus on playing, not on how they look while doing it.”