World's Largest Youth Gender Equality in Sports Organization

GirlsSports was founded by Maegha Ramanathan at the age of 13, after her firsthand experiences with gender inequality in sports.

 

As an avid athlete, Maegha has grown up loving sports. Throughout her childhood, she played a variety of sports and eventually began competing strenuously. After joining a year-long competition team, she began practicing for 2 hours, 5 days a week, striving to improve her best times by even milliseconds. When Maegha began striving for her state competition's cut times, she started receiving degrading comments from male athletes on her team. She was told that she needed to build more muscle and change her "weaker" mindset in order to be as"good" as a male athlete.

 

Each comment was underpinned by the ideology that being male equated to superiority. These comments had a lasting impact on her, casting a shadow of inferiority that loomed over her throughout the remainder of the competition season. After being vulnerable with the other girls on her team, she soon realized it was a shared experience--and the pervasive sexism faced by young females became glaringly evident.

 

At 13, after her first-hand experiences with social inequity, Maegha founded Girls4Sports. Inspired by Malala Yousafzai's words "We realize the power of voices only when we are silenced," Maegha's voracious desire to empower young women to pursue what she was discouraged to led to what GirlsSports has become today.