What do CEO Lauren Makler, entrepreneur and Olympic athlete Alysia Montaño, and tennis great Maria Sharapova all have in common? Through the recent Level the Playing Field campaign, each one of them is helping to fill the gaps that female athletes face when planning and building their families.
Launched this year on National Girls and Women in Sports Day on February 5, Level the Playing Field focuses on the need for fertility freedom for women in sports. Since female athletes’ peak fitness and peak fertility overlap, they often must make a choice between the two; Level the Playing Field, in response, aims to equip them with the knowledge and resources they need to find balance – as well as bring awareness to proactive fertility care for female athletes overall.
Campaign Inspiration
The two companies behind Level the Playing Field – Cofertility and &mother (soon to rebrand to For All Mothers+) – are both products of their founders’ personal experiences with motherhood. Ms. Makler, Cofertility’s CEO and co-founder, was diagnosed with a rare abdominal disease in 2017: one that, she was told, might prevent her from having a biological child. While she ultimately was able to conceive unassisted, that experience allowed her insight into egg donation, which she called a “broken/antiquated [system]
”, and egg-freezing, which she believed is often “out of reach at the time in one’s life they would most benefit from it”. Cofertility, which she, Arielle Spiegel, and Halle Tecco launched in 2022, brings the two together: through its Split program, members can freeze their eggs for free when they donate half of the eggs retrieved to a family that can’t otherwise conceive. The result, according to Ms. Makler, is that “egg freezing [becomes] more accessible, and egg donation [becomes] less transactional at the same time”.
&mother’s CEO and founder, Olympic athlete Alysia Montaño, faced her own challenges when it came to her family: specifically, how to pursue building it as a top-tier athlete. “After competing while visibly pregnant and advocating for maternal protection in sports,” she explained, “I realized that systemic change was needed—not just for athletes, but for all mothers in all industries.” &mother, which was founded on Mothers’ Day in 2020, pushes for and provides that support for athlete-mothers, such as by researching, supporting, and sharing best practices, including lactation support, on-site childcare, and other family-friendly policies at athletic events. Or, in Ms. Montaño’s words, &mother was “created to give pathway to a vision to create a world where motherhood and career ambitions can coexist without compromise”.
Campaign Launch
Together, Ms. Montaño and Ms. Makler “dreamt up” the idea of Level the Playing Field, pulling from the roots that both founders have in the sports world. &mother specifically focuses on supporting athlete-mothers while Ms. Makler has found that, often, those utilizing Cofertility’s programs are athletes “who have spent years prioritizing their pursuit of sport, often without the insight, resources, or support to understand how it could impact their future fertility.” She added, “If elite athletes—whose bodies operate at the peak of human performance—face these challenges, what does that mean for the rest of us?”
And athletes support Cofertility as well as utilizing its services. For one example, former tennis professional Maria Sharapova invested in the company last year. “I’ve really focused in on entrepreneurship since I retired from tennis, and as simple as it may sound, my investment philosophy has been to involve myself with businesses I fully understand and personally see value in. Cofertility easily checks those boxes,” Ms. Sharapova explained. She also has a “personal connection” to the Level the Playing Field campaign specifically; as a professional athlete, “[her]
body was [her] business”: the tool that she needed to pursue her chosen livelihood. “It’s important to me that the female athletes have the knowledge and resources they need to make informed decisions about their bodies and their careers.,” she went on to say. Ms. Makler noted further: “[Ms. Sharapova’s] perspective reinforced what we were already seeing within our own community: with the physical demands of training, delayed family planning, and a lack of proactive fertility education in sports, athletes need fertility preservation options—yet the topic remains largely unaddressed in the sports world.”
In fact, a recent study of hundreds of athletes conducted by Cofertility found 95% of professional female athletes feel motherhood negatively impacts their earning potential, 92% receive no financial or institutional support for fertility care, and 90% believe motherhood affects their career longevity due to inadequate family leave and financial instability. After all, female athletes face being “financially penalized, cut from contracts, and excluded from opportunities to earn money because there are no clauses in their contract that support maternity, pregnancy, and postpartum,” Ms. Montaño said. Followingly, 70% of professional female athletes report having delayed family-building due to their career. And yet, 90% still feel uneducated about options, like egg-freezing, that could help them balance their personal and professional aspirations, and, of those who haven’t pursued fertility preservation, 65% cite lack education on the process and 35% cite career limitations.
Systematic Change
But bringing awareness to this issue and educating athletes about their options is just one part of what the Level the Playing Field campaign hopes to inspire; it also wants to bring about systematic change, such as contract language that protects and supports female athletes.
“It’s imperative for standards in contracts that were built for men by men to be revised to support athletes who may become mothers,” Ms. Montaño shared. To that end, &mother has worked with lawyers and industry leaders across medical fields to understand the physical needs of female athletes and the impact and implications they face without contractual standards. The company then created the Gold Standard for Contractual Language: one of the resources available on the &mother website. Athletes are often young – even in their teens – when they sing contracts; having protective language in those documents from the beginning affords them the “psychological safety”, in Ms. Montaño’s words, of preserving longevity in their careers: otherwise, each athlete might have to fight on a case-by-case basis to have her contract evolve with her life and life decisions, like pursuing motherhood.
Ms. Montaño believes that “brand sponsors, National Governing Bodies, and players associations” should be responsible for providing this evolving support while Ms. Makler calls upon “leagues, teams and governing bodies” to offer education and “comprehensive reproductive health resources, access to fertility preservation options like egg freezing, and family-planning benefits”. Some professional sports leagues, according to Ms. Sharapova, have implemented access to reproductive healthcare and family planning services, paid parental leave, accommodations for nursing mothers, and childcare assistance. But, as she noted, “we’re far from [these measures] being the universal standard”.
And the lack of these standards – in contracts, education, and resources – “continues to hold women back and impede progress towards equality,” said Ms. Sharapova. She continued, “It’s been so exciting to see women’s sports enjoy the explosion of attention and investment they’ve received over the last few years, but without introducing proper support systems like paid parental and family leave, childcare assistance, and more, there will continue to be a ceiling on how much women’s sports can grow.”
Echoing that statement, Ms. Montaño thinks that, without family-planning and family-building support, all parties involved will see a loss. Society, for instance, will lose top-tier talent, companies could lose revenue dollars, and fans will lose the “magic of sports”: the ability to pull for, cheer for, and see themselves in athletes. “When we lose talent, we lose the opportunity to see history written,” she added.
Ms. Montaño herself is one of those athletes who wrote history: she won an Olympic medal in the 2012 Summer Olympics but gained significant publicity two years later when she competed in the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships while eight months pregnant. She fights for contractual support now because she didn’t have any when she was competing; as a result, she “had to make the invisible visible and show what it looked like to be a woman in my career track,”. As she remembered, “In fighting and taking up space, I then recognized that I was leading a movement and, in order to lead that movement, I needed to create a platform that enacts impact and ultimately affects change”. Those past experiences, thus, inspired the infrastructure that &mother is developing – and is sharing with national governing bodies, players associations, brands, corporations, sponsors, and event directors – to support current and future athletes.
Top-Down Support
Without companies like Cofertility, organizations like &mother, and campaigns like Level the Playing Field, there might not be what Ms. Montaño called, “a voice lending itself to understand the needs of female-bodied individuals, let alone understanding the needs of a mother or parent within the sports industry”. After all, sports, like healthcare, remains a male-dominated industry: one without women, much less mothers, at the top.
Ms. Sharapova agreed, saying, “Without women directly involved in decision-making processes, organizations are more susceptible to overlooking issues that specifically or disproportionately impact women — including those that impact female athletes.” She pointed out the lack of science research dedicated exclusively to female athletes; instead, these women have historically been “subjected to the training, treatment, and performance strategies that are designed for men’s bodies and only recently have sports scientists begun to make adjustments to accommodate the unique physiological and hormonal needs of female bodies”. Improved training regimens, injury prevention, and rehabilitation can follow from this female focus.
Some major organizations have already undergone a change and have started understanding the value of investing in and promoting female athletes and women’s sports. Ms. Sharapova cited Ally Financial, which has committed equal spending on men and women’s sports media, and Ernst & Young, whose Athlete Program offers learning and networking opportunities for elite- and Olympic-level athletes
And, of course, &mother is helping lay the foundational support that athletes and their families need to thrive. Through this work, Ms. Montaño reflected, society can use the lens of sports to see, “the positive effects that happen when you give power to women: it gives power to our society and gives power to the importance of family, and ultimately, the bottom line of every company and every organization, is family.” Put another way, &mother’s work, according to Ms. Makler, is simply “groundbreaking”.
Future Hopes
“More than anything,” Ms. Sharapova shared, “I want female athletes to be aware of their options…The results of the Level the Playing Field campaign indicate that women in sports overwhelmingly view their careers as an impediment to starting a family and view starting a family as an impediment to their careers. But it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.” Rather, services like egg-freezing, which has already seen a 194% increase in demand over the past three years, can help women achieve both their professional and personal aspirations according to their timelines – not those of a strict biological clock.
From the start, Ms. Sharapova and other Cofertility partners helped spread the word about Level the Playing Field and “more athletes who heard about what we were doing signed on quickly given how passionately they feel about the topic”, Ms. Makler recalled. She and Ms. Montaño were also intentional about highlighting diverse perspectives, such as the competitive level, age, sport, and personal experience of the athletes and of other partners involved with the campaign. True to form, the Level the Playing Field page on Cofertility’s website features over 25 different testimonials, and the list of influential individuals and brands backing it include Ashlyn Harris, Alexi Pappas, Missy Franklin, Chelsea Sodaro, Carly Patterson, Molly Huddle, Hello Sunshine, MUSE Capital, Strava, Babylist, ON, and more.
“By sharing these stories,” Ms. Makler summarized, “we hope to spark broader conversations, normalize fertility education in sports, and ensure athletes – and all women – have access to the resources they need to make informed decisions about their reproductive futures”. And while Level the Playing Field focuses on the world of sports, the infrastructure that it hopes to change and the narratives that it hopes to promote won’t benefit only female athletes – but rather can help all women start leveling their playing fields.