The health of female athletes is beginning to take a place on the global sports agenda that for decades had been largely overlooked. Clara Wu Tsai, co-owner of the New York Liberty in the WNBA, is leading a $50 million investment aimed at closing a historic gap in medical research applied to women athletes, an area that, according to specialists, has long been dominated by studies based on male physiology.
The funding, carried out together with David Ott and Jane Ott, directly supports the work of the Institute for Women’s Health, Sports and Performance (WHSP), created by the Ott family alongside Dr. Kathryn Ackerman. The goal is to accelerate research, medical education and specialized clinical care for female athletes, opening up a scientific field that until now had progressed with incomplete data and approaches that did not fully consider women’s biological specificities.
A scientific debt to female athletes
“Medical research has always been based on male physiology,” Ackerman explained when announcing the project, highlighting a structural issue that goes beyond sport. For decades, protocols, treatments and performance recommendations were built primarily on studies conducted in men, leaving women athletes in a trial-and-error landscape.
The WHSP seeks to reverse this gap through research covering a wide range of disciplines and profiles: Olympic rowers, rugby players, teenage footballers, dancers and runners are already part of the initial work underway. The institute also plans to conduct studies with diverse demographic groups, from adolescents to professional athletes and postmenopausal women, broadening the focus beyond elite performance.
Investment, women’s sport and a new logic of value
The movement led by Wu Tsai is not an isolated gesture within the women’s sport ecosystem. A year earlier, Michele Kang, owner of Olympique de Lyon and the Washington Spirit, allocated another $50 million to similar initiatives focused on female athlete health, with particular attention to women’s football. The coincidence reveals a growing trend: owners and leaders in women’s sport are beginning to invest not only in infrastructure and talent, but also in applied science.
At the same time, Wu Tsai and her husband Joe Tsai opened the capital of the New York Liberty at a $450 million valuation, a record figure in global women’s sport. Part of those resources will be used to build a new $80 million training center. In this context, investment in medical research appears as a natural extension of a new way of understanding the value of women’s sport: not only as entertainment, but as a space that requires specific knowledge, dedicated resources and scientific standards aligned with its protagonists.
