By Sophia Oppedisano Editorial Staff This year's Super Bowl set a record for viewership with 127.7 million viewers. According to Nielsen, this is the single largest audience for a single-network telecast in history. Every year, the Super Bowl audience speculates about the advertisements that will air during the game. Which will have the celebrity cameos, the humor, the emotion? This year, female empowerment took center stage in ads from Dove and Nike, which used their platforms to uplift everyone from young girls to the most powerful female athletes. Nike’s ad “So Win” was the company’s first Super Bowl ad in 27 years. And they made a statement. Nike gave the stage to nine high-caliber female athletes, including gymnast Jordan Chiles, WNBA star Caitlin Clark, track and field Olympian Sha’carri Richardson, and three-time Grand Slam champion Aryna Sabalenka. Grammy award winner Doechii narrated the black-and-white love letter to the athletes’ accomplishments. She rattled off a list of what female athletes can’t do. Be demanding. Be relentless. Put themselves first. If someone says you can’t do it, Nike says do it anyway. The ad is capped with the message, “You can’t win. So win.” This ad resonated with me as a woman who played sports and is now striving for a career working in sports. For decades, female athletes and women working in sports have not been invited into those spaces. They have not been given a seat at the table. In fact, the rise of women’s sports has only begun in the past decade, coinciding with an outpouring of support for the United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) when five of their star players filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination. The lawsuit was settled in 2022 with the athletes receiving $24 million and a pledge from U.S. Soccer to give the women’s national team the same pay as the men’s. Since then, support for women’s sports has grown into booming success for the WNBA, PWHL, college volleyball and basketball, as well as tennis. My interpretation of Nike’s ad is this: these nine women are examples of female athletes who have pushed through adversity to find success and they are selling out stadiums, breaking records, and letting their emotions show. They are examples of women who go out and win even though the world says they can’t. This is a message to women in sports everywhere - to be confident and persevere in the face of sexism, racism, or even something as small as a man who smirks at you when you tell him you want to play or work in professional sports. Nike managed to put a name to a persistent problem women have been facing for decades. Limitations have long been set for women not just in sports, but in the business world, academia, and even in their families. The ad quickly received criticism. According to the New York Post, comedian Bill Maher called it a “zombie lie” on “Real Time with Bill Maher” Feb. 14. Maher defined a “zombie lie” as a problem that was true in the past, but has since been rectified even though groups of people still try to perpetuate belief that it persists. “When was the last time a woman was told, ‘You can’t do this! You can’t be confident!’ … Who are these imaginary mean old men of the patriarchy?” Maher asked. During Caitlin Clark’s first press conference with the Indiana Fever, reporter Gregg Doyel asked that she give him the famous heart-hand symbol she usually shares with her family. In 2024, ESPN host Pat McAffee called Clark a “white bitch” on “The Pat McAffee Show.” According to CNN, he deemed his comment toward the WNBA phenom a compliment in a broader argument he was attempting to make about how the WNBA only gained popularity because Clark is white. ESPN analyst Kim Adams wrote on X to McAffee, “This is just completely unacceptable. Interested to see how ESPN handles it. And his entire argument is not conducive to anything going on in the WNBA right now. Just let the women hoop.” Clark won the 2024 WNBA Rookie of the Year award just a few months later. I believe this is the spirit of what Nike’s message is about. In 2022, research from Durham University indicated over two-thirds of football fans harbor hostile or misogynistic attitudes toward women’s sports. These attitudes may no longer exist in the form of an angry old man yelling at or about female athletes, but they do exist in the form of microaggressions and the crossing of boundaries. In my own work, men do not blatantly tell me to stop trying or that my writing isn’t good enough. Rather, they make comments such as, “Well, this is certainly a noble goal for you,” or “It’s going to be hard for you to make a name for yourself.” Stark misogyny still exists. Nike’s ad is also encouraging to those who are dealing with covert forms of misogyny, which are no less insidious or pervasive. Female athletes are fighting to maintain their dignity in the face of men who make veiled sexual comments and call them derogatory names. Broad-based misogyny still happens, but the less obvious and veiled microaggressions are subtle paper cuts of sexism that rob women of their dignity and their full agency as female athletes. Sexism may not be appearing in the same way it once did, but it is our job to recognize it in all of its new forms and call it out to protect women in sports. Nike wants the world to know that no matter what, women will win. Nicole Hubbard Graham, Nike’s Chief Marketing Officer, said in a statement, “This brand wasn’t built on Google ads or clicks - it was built on feelings, and big, disruptive, irreverent, emotional ideas.” Those big, disruptive feelings are exactly what the world is telling women not to feel. Nike managed to put our frustrations into words. You can’t feel. So feel. You can’t write. So write. You can’t have opinions. So have opinions. You can’t fight. So fight. And win.