Women’s sport makes up only 4% of all sport coverage.*

With UEFA Women's EURO England 2022, Women’s Rugby World Cup and ICC Women’s World Cup taking place in 2022, the global stage is set to spotlight women’s sport, but barriers to inclusion and visibility prevail.

So, leveraging the biggest year in women’s sporting history, M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment led a successful proposal to the Saatchi Gallery to host ‘In-Focus: Women’s Sport through the Lens’, a three-week exhibition in partnership with Getty Images. Aiming to truly change the game, this free photography exhibition harnessed the power of the image to set a blueprint for the inclusive representation of women’s sport.

The exhibition hosted 36 images of female athletes across 19 sports in 14 countries - showing how visual gatekeepers have portrayed women’s sport across 50 years. The exhibition explored significant cultural conversations from the world of sport: Equality, Anatomy, Motherhood, Mental Health and Activism. We showed how far women’s sport has come in diversity and inclusion, but crucially, how far the media, brands, sporting associations and society still needs to travel.

Working with Anna Kessel, MBE and Editor of Telegraph Women’s Sport Supplement, we led the biggest curation team the Saatchi Gallery had seen, a dedicated effort to ensure the exhibition was truly inclusive. The team included Shaunagh Brown (England & Harlequins Rugby), Jude Hamer (British Wheelchair Basketball), Lauren Rowles MBE (British Paralympic Rowing) and Jacqueline Bourke (Getty Images).

As a result, the exhibition set a new standard for inclusion, developed specifically to ensure a consistent viewing journey for all. This included lowering the eyeline of photography by 20cm for wheelchair users. The exhibition also tackled the under-representation of female photographers and included new commissions bringing to life Getty Images Visual GPS (2022) guidelines for the inclusive visual storytelling of female athletes.

With more than 25,000 visitors across three-weeks, and a reach of 6 million through social media, the exhibition illuminated the changing landscape of women’s sport, and gave M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment another platform to consider a longer-term goal - equity in sport.

Through the exhibition, we reinforced the commercial opportunity in women’s sport for brands and sponsors, now seeing far more activity in the space. Long-time sponsor of England Rugby Men, O2, now spends an equal sponsorship fee on the women’s team. We launched Barclay’s ‘It All Starts with a Chance’ campaign, a commitment to giving girls in England equal access to football in schools, and to mark tickets general sale for the UEFA Women’s EURO England 2022, we installed larger-than-life women’s table football figurines over Carnaby Street, selling out 7 Wembley games within an hour, with 80% of tickets purchased in the week after our PR stunt by consumers unknown to UEFA/FA.

The exhibition has been embraced globally (potential future hosts include Sweden and Australia) and continues to be exhibited across the UK, including at Lord’s Cricket Ground, BBC Studios and UK Sport, setting a global standard for the inclusivity and visibility of women’s sport.