01/08/2025
Women Lead the Fitness Floor – So Why Aren’t More Leading the Industry?
Walk into almost any gym in Australia and you’ll see it:
🧘🏾♀️Women teaching the classes.
👩🏻🏫Women driving member engagement.
☎️Women are running the day-to-day operations of business and home.
🍿But when you look up the food chain?
💨The leadership picture changes — fast.
👉🏼Here’s the reality:
Twenty-five per cent of board chairs in Australian sports bodies are women.
How many women sit on fitness, leisure, supplier or private sector boards?
Only 35% of private sector organisations have gender-balanced leadership.
Globally, women hold only 36% of leadership roles in the fitness industry, compared to 47% held by men.
This is not just a diversity problem.
It’s a business problem. It's our problem. We work in an industry that inspires and creates opportunities for people to achieve better health. Let's inspire and create opportunities for our women.
Too many women are being stereotyped into soft roles.
Women are being appointed to tick the boxes.
When leadership teams lack diversity, they miss:
✅ Fresh ideas ✅ Better decision-making
✅ Stronger member retention and acquisition
✅ Challenging Opinions for betterment ✅ Experience
Women already lead on the floor; they invest more in their education.
The majority of your members are women. Your marketing is predominantly targeted at women, so why not open the door of opinion and power to them?
It’s time they led; it's time they had a bigger voice; it's time those at the top of the food chain stopped and listened.
We must open the door and let women in.
