Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet, with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.
Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy.
It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.
He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.
Ah, really?
Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy.
What's in your wallet?
Terms apply.
See CapitalOne.com slash Bank.
Capital One N.A.
Member FDIC.
This episode is brought to you by Ambetter Health.
Group health insurance can put businesses in a tough position.
If you're a business owner, a CFO, or an HR leader, this is probably gonna sound familiar.
It's fall and you find out.
Your group health insurance premium will be more expensive next year, maybe by a lot.
And, as usual, you have to pick one carrier and a few plans for all of the employees.
But they each have different medical needs, different budgets and different preferences for doctors.
Plus, the carrier's network might not be strong where all employees live.
Fortunately, there's a new approach.
It's called an ICHRA, and it's a game-changer.
ICRAs make costs predictable with stable pre-tax contributions and a larger risk pool.
And they make health plans personal because employees can buy any plan that fits their needs from any carrier.
You choose how much to contribute.
They choose what works for them.
It's about time, right?
For coverage you control, plan on an ICRA.
Learn more at ambetterhealth.com slash ICHRA.
This show is brought to you by Dell.
Introducing your new Dell PC powered by the Intel Core Ultra processor.
It helps you handle a lot, even when your holiday to-do list gets to be a lot, because it's built with all-day battery plus powerful AI features that help you do it all with ease.
From editing images to drafting emails to summarizing large documents to multitasking.
So you can organize your holiday shopping and make custom holiday decor and search for great holiday deals and respond to holiday requests and customer questions and customers requesting custom things and plan the perfect holiday dinner for vegans vegetarians, pescatarians and Uncle Mike's carnivore diet.
Luckily, you can get a PC that helps you do it all faster so you can get it all done.
That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside.
Backed by Dell's price match guarantee.
Get yours today at dell.com slash holiday.
Terms and conditions apply.
See dell.com for details.
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hu.
Thankfully, women's sports are finally experiencing a huge surge in popularity around the world.
I mean, who's not watching the WNBA playoffs right now?
There's been record-breaking viewership and attendance of games across sports and significant revenue growth.
And yet, social media algorithms, for example, are still skewing largely to covering men's sports.
In her talk, Olympic medalist and world champion rower Kate Johnson, who now leads global marketing strategy for sports and entertainment at Google, unpacks how and why this is still happening and why it's time to get serious about leveling the playing field for women's sports.
The Olympics has always served as a touchpoint for me to reflect on just how quickly our world changes.
Think about it.
Every four years, the Summer Olympics shine a massive spotlight on how much our technology evolves between the Games.
So I want you to take a minute and picture yourself in the year 2004.
Try to remember the world back then.
We didn't have iPhones.
The Facebook, as it was originally known, was just emerging on college campuses and YouTube.
It wasn't a thing.
I competed at the Athens 2004 Olympics in women's rowing, which may as well have been the ancient Olympics as far as technology goes.
I was still using a flip phone and I sent my friends and family email updates from the games using my Hotmail account and dial-up internet.
So now I want you to imagine what it was like to win the first U.S.
Olympic medal in the event in 20 years.
And rather than getting to instantly share that news with the world via my Instagram or TikTok account, my teammates and I had to wait to see if the Olympic broadcasters and journalists would cover it.
Our story was entirely in their hands to tell or not.
Well, 20 years later, and all of this has changed.
In an instant.
We have sports scores, match results and news stories at our fingertips and on our phones the moment it happens.
And this is incredible.
But there's still a problem.
It's one thing to seek out the information you're looking for.
It's another thing entirely to stumble upon it.
The stumbling upon it goes like this.
You're scrolling through your social media feed, you see something that captures your attention.
You click on it and poof down the rabbit hole.
You go, you're locked in.
Well, this stumbling upon is what we in marketing call discoverability.
And for sports, it's the magic that fuels existing fans and captures new ones, pulling them in.
But while it's easier than ever to search for sports news on Instagram, TikTok or Google, the information that fans stumble upon, or rather discover well, it's served up to us by algorithms.
They use historical data, fan interactions, and what's trending, which mainly skews to men's sports.
Despite incredible talent, heated rivalries and growing popularity, women's sports remain largely invisible in our daily content feeds.
And this has real-world implications.
I've spent nearly two decades in global sports and entertainment marketing at IMG, at Visa and now at Google and I've seen firsthand how and why this happens.
So I want to unpack this with you all.
I want you to think about these technology platforms as massive digital libraries and the algorithms as the librarians.
They're great at organizing, indexing, and cataloging information, but here's the important bit.
They can only make recommendations from what's on the shelves, which historically, for many decades and only until very recently, has been 19 stories about men's sports for every one story about women's sports.
19 to 1.
So if I ask any of these technology platforms who has scored the most goals for their country in international football, who do you think I get?
Most of you are debating, is it Cristiano Ronaldo?
Maybe Messi?
Well, as of recently, Cristiano Ronaldo has scored 141 goals for Portugal.
But factually speaking, this answer is wrong.
And spoiler alert, it's not Messi either.
The correct answer to this gender ambiguous query is Christine Sinclair of Canada with 190 goals.
That's right.
This isn't just a mistake.
It's a symptom of a bigger problem.
And it's one example of many.
These gender ambiguous queries come down to word matching issues within the algorithms.
When sports journalists commentators, content creators consistently publish content that gender qualifies women's sports but not men's, we get an imperfect response.
For the person looking to settle the Messi versus Ronaldo debate, this answer works and for the majority of people entering this query, this is what they're looking for.
But the factual omission of women in these answers and in our daily content feeds well.
It negatively impacts the athletes who have worked very hard for the distinction, but also the fans who are looking for this information.
This lack of visibility fuels what's often referred to as the vicious cycle of underinvestment.
The vicious cycle of underinvestment.
In 2023.
For example, president of FIFA Gianni Infantino went on record criticizing many of the traditional broadcast networks for offering up to 100 times less for the women's rights, even as the 2023 World Cup tournament approached half that of the men's tournament.
The same thing's happening here in the United States with NCAA men's and women's basketball.
The men's tournament earns 11 billion per year in media rights fees, 17 times more than the estimated value of the women's tournament, even as the last three finals, on average, are approaching par.
These costs.
They don't just undervalue women's sports, they're undervaluing the women's sports fan, which is a huge miss in the bigger economic picture.
It turns out, compared to men's sports, fans of women's sports are younger, they're generally more tech savvy and they're more loyal to brands who sponsor women's sports.
But in a world where men's sports are everywhere and women's sports are harder to find, These short-sighted media rights holders and gatekeepers, while they're failing certainly the athletes, but also the fan and especially, and maybe more importantly, our girls.
Which leads me to the real kicker.
Despite the recent surge in women's sports, our girls are still dropping out of sport at twice the rate of boys, by the age of 14.
If they can't see incredible content of female athletes crushing it in sport and in life, it makes it harder for them to see sport as a pathway for themselves.
If they can't see it, how can they ever dream of becoming it?
I know without a doubt I would not be the person or leader I am today were it not for the lessons I learned as an athlete.
The grit, the determination, the teamwork, the accountability, the resilience all of it has had a significant impact on the rest of my life.
And this makes sense.
We know there's a direct correlation between girls who grow up playing sports becoming women who lead.
But while 94 of C-suite women grew up playing sports, only 6 of global CEOs are female, which means when girls drop out of sports, a significant pipeline for future female leadership suffers.
Now, there is good news.
Women's sports are growing, and it's thanks to the contributions of new media players that are reimagining the sports landscape for women's sports.
Brands who understand the value and are leaning in.
Athletes, fans who are working as content creators behind the scenes, and yes, even you and me.
Brands and media rights holders who understand the value of women's sports audiences.
They're leaning in and they're reimagining traditional models around sports rights.
Take Visa.
They became the first ever standalone sponsor of UEFA women's football.
They worked with UEFA to basically unbundle the women's sponsorship rights from what was traditionally sold as a bundle with the men's.
Another interesting example this year came from streaming platform Netflix, who secured the exclusive rights in the US and Canada for the next two FIFA Women's World Cups.
I'm proud to say that at Google, we're tackling the bias challenge from both sides.
We're getting smarter at responding to your gender-ambiguous queries while at the same time working with content teams like Arsenal, Liverpool women's clubs, making sure that, across India, women's cricket, the WNBA, the National Women's Soccer League we're creating more stories for the algorithmic librarian to catalog and recommend.
Our search products are getting better at women's sports discoverability and at the same time, we're working with media partners at ESPN, The Athletic, even British Vogue, increasing the coverage of women's sports.
Athletes and fans are also playing a critical role in reimagining new models.
They're building their own audiences with social media, creating brands that live far beyond the field of play.
Take US rugby player Alona Mar.
She blew up on social media during the Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 Olympics with her hilarious behind-the-scenes glimpses of athlete life in the Olympic Village.
She became her own media channel, connecting with audiences and making herself and women's rugby more visible and more relatable than traditional media ever could.
Canadian creator and fan Logan Hackett, aka Sports with Logs, is another awesome example.
She breaks down complex plays, rules and controversies, making women's sports easier to understand and more accessible to new fans.
More recently, I've been paying attention to how AI is poised to accelerate all of this, while AI slop is a real thing.
In the right hands.
Tools like Gemini and ChatGPT can enable anyone to create thoughtful, production-level quality content and distribute it at scale.
Take podcast host Sean Callinan, whose Sports Geek Rapid Rundown podcast uses AI to curate the business news of the day into daily episodes on a variety of topics, all in his own AI-generated voice.
He turns these out with incredible speed and efficiency.
But the real impact?
That's going to come from all of us.
Your likes, your shares, your follows, the athletes that you track, the sports that you follow.
It all plays a significant role in contributing to the library of women's sports content.
My challenge to you is this.
Go further.
Go beyond what the algorithm serves you.
Follow athletes that intrigue you.
Maybe try your hand at telling their story as a content creator yourself, even if on a small scale.
If you're a brand, consider investing in women's sports media or becoming a sponsor.
If you're a consumer, buy brands who sponsor women's sports.
It all matters.
For too long, you cannot be what you cannot see has been a quiet barrier.
But what if we flip that from a warning into a call to action?
Had I been able to instantly share my proudest Olympic moments way back when, I wonder what young athlete I would have reached through the void and what boardroom she might be sitting in today.
Leveling the playing field for women's sports is going to take all of us, from brands, media rights holders, athletes and fans to you and me.
When we choose to reimagine the future of women's sports, we open the door to possibility.
Let's reimagine the future of women's sports, not as something we have to work hard to find, but as something we deliberately and collectively build to be seen.
Thank you.
That was Kate Johnson speaking at TED Sports, Indianapolis in 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TEDcom slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was fact-checked by the TED Sports research team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tanzika Sangmarnivong.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hu.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
This episode is brought to you by Capital One.
Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI, they already deployed one.
It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping.
Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks.
It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing and estimate trade-in value.
Advanced, intuitive, and deployed.
That's how they stack.
That's technology at Capital One.
Is your business struggling to keep up when the world moves fast, relying on yesterday's technology will slow you down.
Erickson powers your business with 5g and ai enterprise solutions.
From local franchises to global companies, erickson helps businesses like yours to operate smoothly, stay protected and keep growing every day.
Speed up and stay ahead.
Visit us at ericksoncom enterprise.
In a world of seismic change, will your business shape the future or be shaped by it?
How will we capture the imagination of tomorrow's consumers?
Overcome operational constraints to focus on future growth.
And unlock economic and social prosperity through environmental responsibility.
With EY's full spectrum of services across sectors, we're all in to shape the future with confidence.
Start your transformation journey at ey.com slash transformation.
