It's been a long time in coming, but at last the landscape for women in sport is finally beginning to shift.
Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen significant improvements in sponsorship, prize money and professional contracts for sportswomen around the world.
There’s been increased media coverage for women’s sport and recognition of female athletes as role models and activists for social change.
The participation gap between men and women is closing and, after decades of sport being led and managed by men, we’re finally seeing more women taking influential roles as board directors, editors, coaches and officials.
But despite these recent advances, and improvements in gender equality, sport is still a very male dominated space, something which can be intimidating for women hoping to build a career in the sector.
It has been this way since formalised sport was established more than 150 years ago – with women considered too frail to compete and completely excluded from the first Olympic Games.
Although in Tokyo next year we will finally see equal numbers of men and women competing, sadly this balance is not the same across all sport.
In most team sports, female athletes still do not get equal funding or opportunities – even though they train as hard and make the same sacrifices as their male counterparts.
In many sports, women receive less prize money, fewer professional contracts opportunities, lower sponsorship revenues and a tiny fraction of the media coverage.
Girls often do not have the access to sports, funding and facilities as boys, and, despite the huge impact of campaigns like This Girl Can, women are still less likely to take part in sport than the men around them.
I love sport. I was a sporty girl growing up, studied sport at university and have been lucky enough to work in the sports sector for over 30 years. But as the years have passed, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the massive disparity for women in sport. The inequality in women’s sport makes me angry, but I see great hope for the future.