- Christina Macfarlane, CNN Anchor and ISC Host -CNN
- Nigel Fletcher, CEO -International Sports Convention
- Maya Herm, AVP, Global Strategy & Growth-The Collective
The ISC Women’s Sport Business Summit has taken a burgeoning conversation to an unexpected venue: the National Gallery in London.
Yet as ISC Nigel Fletcher explained, it is a surprisingly apposite setting. In his opening remarks, he drew parallels between the growth of women’s sport and the push to address gender inequality in the art world a generation ago.
In the 1980s, the Guerilla Girls campaign group called the world’s attention to the underrepresentation of female artists’ work in major galleries where female bodies accounted for most of the nudes on display. Their efforts stirred the art scene into action, driving better representation and forever altering cultural expectations.
That change has since come for women in sport. Looking inward, Fletcher reflected on the representation of women at ISC conferences since their debut in 2009. In the first event, just six per cent of speakers on stage were female; in 2025, that number reached 38 per cent. The target for the 2025 International Sports Convention is 51 per cent but even then, the work will still not be over.
Those sentiments were echoed by The Collective’s Maya Hern. When the USA won the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup, her journalist mother was moved to tears – later writing of how overwhelmed she had been by the progress female athletes had made in her lifetime, and how natural all of that had seemed to her young daughter.
It is a moment and a piece that Hern refers to with every milestone that women’s sport passes. “It takes so much time and energy for change to happen,” she said.
Women’s sport, Hern added, is “imperfect but always improving”. The enthusiasm for new icons and growing competitions may be thriving but it is not universal. There are more people to reach, more minds to change, and more fans to inspire.
The challenge laid before the audience at the ISC Women’s Sport Business Summit – and the wider sports industry and community – is to keep that momentum going.