There's no doubt about it that my participation in sports allowed me to compete in the business world in a very gender-neutral way.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think we're actually the only sport that has a mix of men and women competing together. The majority of other sports are separated by gender.
In recent generations, women's sports have been a blessing. Some of us can remember the bad old days in the '50s, when we would discover in casual schoolyard play that a girl could outrun most of us or hold her own in basketball or hit a softball - but there were no teams, no coaches, for girls.
I just happen to be a woman and involved in sport, but that doesn't necessarily make me a feminist.
It's something that can get overwhelming and frustrating, the sexism I experience in my career. It's just obviously a big issue in women's sport, like salaries, media coverage, just general things that you have to cope with in your career.
When I was really young, the women's national team wasn't on a grand media stage, so my role models were male basketball and male American football players.
When they take surveys of women in business, of the Fortune 500, the successful women, 80% of them, say they were in sports as a young woman.
As women professional athletes, you have to have respect for every player and individual. Beyond that, it doesn't matter what your interests are. People can have their own lives.
I find it fascinating that sport has such a strong connection to success in business. Arguably, C-suite women are some of the most successful women, and more than half of them played at a more advanced level than just the general population of women in business that had sport in their background.
Technology is one of the key drivers of female economic empowerment, but the fields that women choose to participate in are still decidedly gendered.
I don't think there's anything that is a greater area of discrimination against women today than the fact that nowhere in the world is there a female role model in team sports that more than half of a general audience would recognize.