E.l.f. Beauty’s New York summit reveals new research linking girls’ participation in sports to higher chances of leadership, negotiation skills, and career advancement in adulthood, emphasising sport’s long-term impact on workplace success.
e.l.f. Beauty used a New York summit on women’s sport to make a broader argument about the workplace: girls who stay in sport appear to carry that experience into their careers. Research the company commissioned with Parity found that women who played sport for at least three years before the end of high or secondary school were almost 50% more likely to hold leadership posts, 37% more likely to aim for senior leadership and nearly 25% more likely to have negotiated their pay.
The findings were unveiled on 31 August 2026 at the third Power of Women’s Sports Summit in New York City, produced by Billie Jean King Enterprises and presented by e.l.f. Cosmetics. According to the underlying report, the project drew on surveys of 9,056 women aged 18 to 65 who work or have worked full time in the past five years, alongside 328 professional women athletes and 114 male and female board members. The quantitative work was supplemented by 21 interviews. The authors also acknowledge an important limitation: the comparisons show correlation rather than proving that sport itself caused later career outcomes.
Fortune reported that just over 5,000 respondents were classified as “Everyday Athletes”, the study’s term for women with sustained sport participation, while fewer than 4,000 either never played or did so only briefly. The report argues that the advantage is not simply about title or status, but about the habits sport can build. Fortune said the traits most strongly associated with those women were teamwork, communication, discipline, perseverance, adaptability and the ability to perform under pressure.
Some of the strongest supporting numbers concern progression rather than simple ambition. Nearly 90% of Everyday Athletes who had been promoted said a skill learned through sport had helped them advance, while 69% of those with at least five years in the workforce said those lessons mattered even more in today’s working environment. A further 80% of women leaders in that group said sport had been an important part of their upbringing, according to the report released through Business Wire syndication and repeated by MarTechEdge.
Fortune also said the effect was not identical across markets. In the United States, the clearest legacy of girls’ sport was a greater tendency to speak up for oneself. In Canada, the sharpest link was with ambition. In Germany, Everyday Athletes were reported to be 45% more likely to have been promoted multiple times. In the United Kingdom, the biggest gap between athletes and non-athletes showed up in salary negotiation.
The survey team also tested whether the pattern held up among women who reached the top of sport or business. Among the professional athletes polled, 98% said sport had prepared them for life after competition. Among board members, 85% said lessons from sport mattered for future directors. At the summit, the US national team and Gotham FC player Jaedyn Shaw gave the personal version of that case, saying she had already learned from sport through “setbacks” and through “getting 1% better every single day”. Headline Society reported that speakers at the event also included Billie Jean King and racing driver Katherine Legge.
For e.l.f., the report is not a one-off piece of brand messaging but part of a wider strategy that links its women’s sports investments to its boardroom campaign. The company has built sponsorships across leagues and personalities including the NWSL, the Professional Women’s Hockey League and Billie Jean King, while also promoting its Change the Board Game initiative on corporate representation. Patrick O’Keefe, e.l.f. Brands’ chief integrated marketing officer, said the research “puts numbers behind what we’ve always believed”. Speaking at the summit, he also pointed to a more basic problem: girls drop out of sport at three times the rate of boys, adding, “We want to change that conversation.”
There are, however, signs of improvement. Company-backed material said 70% of Gen Z women who started playing sport stayed with it through the end of school, up from 62% of Baby Boomers. Even so, the same material said girls in the United States, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom still take part in sport at lower rates than boys. Leela Srinivasan, Parity’s chief executive, said the gains identified by the study were “linked to participation itself”, not to becoming an elite athlete. If that holds true, the argument for keeping more girls in games, clubs and school teams reaches far beyond sport and into the pipeline for management, pay confidence and the boardroom.
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