White was in her final year at Boston College when she realized she’d been playing basketball her entire life in sneakers designed for men. It wasn’t just that the models were named after male superstars such as LeBron James and Steph Curry. It was that the sneakers had a heel cup that was too wide, a toe box that was too narrow and arches designed to support an average man’s thicker foot.

A finance and art major who’d managed Boston College’s women’s basketball team, White decided to start a company making sneakers for female hoopers like herself. Seven years later, Moolah Kicks has financial backing from billionaire Mark Cuban, along with several models of sneakers featuring bold, jaunty designs that can be found in hundreds of Dick’s Sporting Goods stores. “This brand is for the love of women’s basketball,” says White, now 28. “It’s to take charge of our own ecosystem and our own future.”

Moolah Kicks is part of a growing cadre of high-performance footwear brands developed specifically for female athletes. These startups are analyzing the unique biomechanics of women, investing in factory infrastructure to expand production and educating female athletes about the importance of fit when it comes to both performance and injury reduction. Their collective effort is pushing the industry to move beyond the insulting “shrink it and pink it” approach.

That’s the default mentality of many executives, which became painfully evident when, a decade ago, Nike Inc. tested its revolutionary carbon-plated Zoom Vaporfly 4% marathon shoes on 18 men with similar-size feet, only to market them to women as a “unisex” product.

“The world has almost magically just woken up to the fact that women aren’t just small men,” says Leela Srinivasan, chief executive officer of Parity, a sports marketing and sponsorship platform for professional women athletes.

For years footwear giants have only half-heartedly taken women’s performance footwear seriously. As far back as the mid-1990s, Adidas AG noted that female soccer players competed in shoes “not built for their foot” and promised to “fill a void” with products designed for the biomechanics of US players Carla Overbeck and Kristine Lilly.

Nike launched Air Swoopes, its first-ever women’s signature shoe, for WNBA legend Sheryl Swoopes. Yet such efforts repeatedly fell victim to the usual excuses — the shoes were too expensive to develop and market; they cannibalized men’s models — and were eventually abandoned. (Adidas says it’s focused on “creating the best possible products for both female and male athletes” and gains valuable insights from its many close partnerships with top female athletes. Nike says that it’s “always been a leader in supporting women in sport” and that women today are central to its research and innovation process.)

For decades women and girls have grown accustomed to buying basketball, soccer and running shoes in the men’s section or settling for sneakers disingenuously pitched as unisex. Companies have been reluctant to do anything about it: To develop a female-specific line, they’d need to construct a model of a woman’s foot and then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating millimeter-precise industrial molds and other manufacturing hardware to churn out a particular sneaker in as many as 28 sizes. Brands then must market the shoes and sell enough pairs to recoup all those costs.

But it’s getting harder to ignore the growth of the market. Sales of women’s performance footwear in the US rose 6%, to $6.8 billion, in the year that ended in August, compared with just 3% for men’s products, to $9.1 billion, according to Beth Goldstein, an analyst at market researcher Circana. Scientists are also increasingly linking women wearing improperly fitting sneakers to a higher incidence of sports injuries, often in feet, ankles and knees.

Laura Youngson, a former London Olympics organizer from England, first became aware of this problem almost a decade ago. She’d organized a women’s soccer match atop Mount Kilimanjaro, hoping to set a world record for the highest-altitude game for any sex. The group achieved world-record status, but while climbing up the mountain alongside women’s World Cup veterans, Youngson was shocked to hear how some top players had spent their entire career wearing men’s shoes.

She pored over the research, learning that women’s bodies exert pressure differently in shoes than men’s bodies do and how that may be linked to the prevalence of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries, chronic pain and other maladies. In 2020 she introduced the first products for Ida Sports, whose soccer cleats designed for women feature a narrower heel cup, more arch support, a wider toe box and shorter studs for safer traction.

“We’ve had players that have come to us that have tried 30 different shoes, and then they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I found you. I’m never leaving,’” Youngson says. “‘You’ve literally stopped me from being in pain.’”In recent years, bigger athletic brands have finally started paying attention. In 2022, Puma SE unveiled the Stewie 1, the industry’s first new women’s signature basketball shoe in more than a decade, with WNBA star Breanna Stewart. Around that time, Under Armour Inc. acknowledged it was making its first-ever running shoe on a women’s last.

In 2023, Nike, claiming its “most meaningful investment in women yet,” introduced its Phantom Luna soccer cleat, designed to combat the elevated ACL injury risk with a circular stud formation. And Adidas released its Exhibit Select, declaring that while most basketball shoes are designed for men, the German sneaker giant, which has been manufacturing footwear for the sport since 1965, was now “turning our back on compromise” for women. (Currently the Exhibit Select is no longer available and all of Adidas’ basketball shoes are “unisex,” though the brand has women-specific options in soccer, rugby and tennis, it says.)

For the upstarts, designing the shoe is only the first battle. Lindsay Housman’s chronic foot pain from running gave her the idea for Hettas, her performance-running brand.

She was dumbfounded to learn that her shoes had been designed primarily for male feet, so Hettas are built with, among other things, a narrower heel, a roomier toe box and a snugger fit across the top to hold the foot securely in place. After starting the company in 2021, she hired a New Balance sales veteran to try to get distribution in popular running stores, but he couldn’t persuade them to carry her sneakers, even though women make up a majority of road racers in the US each year.

“When you look at the retailers, they’re now going to have to explain to their customers that their other shoes aren’t built for women,” says Housman, who lives in Vancouver. She now primarily sells Hettas online.

Other founders are facing different institutional hurdles. While White’s company has sponsored WNBA superstar Courtney Williams in the past, the Minnesota Lynx guard had to cover up the Moolah Kicks logo during games to avoid getting fined, because a WNBA policy requires brands to pay the Nike-backed league for the privilege of having their logos displayed on the court. Ida Sports is experiencing a similar headache with its athletes in the National Women’s Soccer League.

There have been some cultural victories, though. Ida recently got a boost thanks to cameos of its cleats in . And both Ida and Moolah are seeing particular progress at the youth level, where a new generation of girls already has a wider selection of athletic footwear catering to their bodies. These startups say the big brands’ finally treating this market more seriously — such as Nike’s new Caitlin 1 collection, in collaboration with WNBA star Caitlin Clark, which is nonetheless a unisex product — is validating. “We’re really focused on our own mission,” White says. “Rising the tide to lift all boats.”