‘It makes a massive difference’: How football gear made especially for women is changing the game

Like almost every female athlete in Australia, Melissa Maizels learned to play the sport she loves using equipment that wasn’t designed for her.

The Melbourne Victory goalkeeper started playing football at the age of nine, but it wasn’t until she was 18 that she pulled on her first pair of gloves.

She remembers them well: they were two sizes too big — the only pair she could find at the store — and she had to pull them so tight around her wrists that the excess strap would flap about when she moved.

It wasn’t until 2018, seven years after signing her first W-League contract, that Maizels was given a pair of goalkeeper gloves that were made specifically for female hands.

“Like every other person, I wore whatever gloves I could get; whatever I could get the cheapest, and gloves are not cheap,” Maizels told ABC.

“You can probably get away with wearing one pair of boots for one full season, but a pair of gloves only lasts you about six weeks — sometimes only three weeks, given our volume of training — so I was spending a lot of money of gloves.

“I was just wearing the stock-standard gloves; they fit as well as they possibly could, but at the end of the day, we are built a bit differently to men.

The trial gloves were provided by an American company called Keepher, whose goalkeeper gloves are tailor-made to fit the average female hand.

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Unlike the male hand, which is the universal standard for most gloves, female hands tend to be narrower in the palm, slimmer around the wrists, and with fingers of different spaces and lengths.

“Any goalkeeper will tell you that the equipment you use — the pair of gloves you use — actually makes a massive difference in the way you play,” Maizels said.

“Having the confidence to know you can potentially catch a shot or a cross that you might otherwise need to parry or push away, that’s a key thing I noticed straight off the bat.”

Maizels’ experience of using sports equipment designed for male bodies is extremely common among female athletes. In fact, it’s not even exclusive to sport.

As writer and activist Caroline Criado Perez says in her book Invisible Women: “Designers may believe they are making products for everyone, but in reality, they are mainly making them for men.”

“The impact can be relatively minor — struggling to reach a top shelf set at a male height norm, for example. Irritating, certainly. But not life-threatening.

“Not like crashing in a car whose safety tests don’t account for women’s measurements. Not like dying from a stab wound because your police body armour doesn’t fit you properly.

“For these women, the consequences of living in a world built around male data can be deadly.”

Sport, of course, is not (always) a life-threatening occupation. But women’s performances and participation can be directly affected by the equipment and apparel on offer.

A recent study by Victoria University, for example, found uniform design played a major role in whether teenage girls participated in school sport.

It’s the wider disparity between men’s and women’s sports gear and apparel that Canberra-based businesswoman Helen Ritchie wants to address.

Ritchie came up with the idea for her company Even Playing Field after spotting a pair of Maizels’ Keepher gloves during a W-League game in 2018. She bought a pair online for her daughter, Georgia, who hasn’t worn another pair since.

Even Playing Field soon expanded to include other sports gear designed for female bodies such as Ida football boots and Zena Sports padded protection garments for women who play contact sport.

“My passion is about getting things that fit girls and women properly,” Ritchie told the ABC.

“I’m just focusing on female clubs at the moment and I love it; I can go to their trainings, take the boots, take the gloves, take the Zenas, and the girls can try them all on, see how they fit.

“They’re just loving it; they’re loving having something that’s specifically for their bodies, not just a ‘pink it and shrink it’ version.

“I don’t want her being put off by the time she’s 14 or 15 because she feels uncomfortable; these girls are going through puberty, you want to keep them in sport, so you give them stuff that’s not going to make them feel self-conscious.”

Ritchie has plans to expand Even Playing Field’s gear offerings to include other sports like cricket, AFL, rugby league and rugby union, as well as fan gear from women’s competitions around the world that major Australian retailers don’t stock.

“At club level, all the first-grade women cricketers are in men’s uniforms,” she said. “One of the clubs I approached, their women obviously want to wear stuff that fits, but they’re under a contract.

“Nike produce women’s kits; look at the uproar when they released the Matildas kit for the Women’s World Cup. They can do it, it’s just that they’re making the commercial decision not to, and I don’t think clubs should have to enter into contracts with them if they can’t provide it for both genders.”

As women’s sport continues to grow in popularity and visibility around Australia, so too will the demand for gear and equipment specifically designed for women’s bodies.

By providing athletes with what they need to reach their full potential, retention rates for women in sport will rise and the industry itself will continue to blossom. 

“At the end of the day, if there’s demand for something, if enough women feel like they can speak up and say, ‘We want this, we want to see something in this space,’ someone’s going to come out and try to meet those needs,” Maizels said.

“When you think about it, what if we gave men a women’s-cut kit? How would they feel about that? Our bodies are built differently. You go into any clothing store and there’s a men’s and a women’s section, so why not in football?