The Eternally Wounded Athlete: How Medical Professionals and Sports Injury Researchers Have Limited Female Athletes’ Sport Participation and Biased the Interpretation of Sports Injury Research

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Female sports participation has long been diminished compared to male sports participation. This review contextualizes current findings in historical implicit gender bias. RECENT FINDINGS: The transition from the recognition of the Female Athlete Triad Syndrome to the Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport Syndrome (RED-S Syndrome) to the newly proposed Male Athlete Triad Syndrome demonstrates the power of implicit gender bias on sports injury research efforts, clinical practices, and policy decisions. Similarly, anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries have long been portrayed as a young female athlete injury, a perception which has affected the sports medicine world in a way that has resulted in both male and female athletes not fully benefitting from possible research and clinical advances SUMMARY: This review explores the history of female exclusion from sport and considers how modern sport and exercise medicine has, perhaps because of implicit gender biases, inadvertently contributed to that exclusion.