The gender fitness gap, aka why women exercise less than men - and how we can change it

New year, new me. Here we are in 2025: a fresh start, a blank page, a clean canvas on which to paint the glorious colours of a fabulous new life. Although, to be honest, I’m looking for my new life to differ from my old life in only one respect – that somehow, in some fashion, I will finally get fit.

Until recently, I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve been utterly uninterested in physical exercise. Well, I’m interested, but for the wrong reasons. For the past 20 years, I’ve viewed exercise as a means to a single end, and that end has been losing weight. I’ve been oblivious to its myriad other benefits: to my bone density, cardiac health, mental wellbeing, cognitive function, longevity.

But gradually it’s been borne in upon me that everyone from the World Health Organisation (WHO) to my local GP – whom I regard as a cross between the Delphic oracle and Paul the Octopus in her ability to divine the truth – is proclaiming the miraculous powers of movement.

The problem, according to WHO, is that without regular exercise, our risk of all-cause mortality (death from any reason) rises by 20 to 30 per cent. Think about that: if you don’t exercise, you’re up to a third more likely to die at any given point. Yet despite this, the terrible truth is that in 2022 more than a third of Australian adults – 37 per cent, says the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) – weren’t doing enough aerobic activity, and a whopping 79 per cent weren’t doing enough muscle-strengthening exercises. (In case you’re in denial, ahem, we should all be doing at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity every week, plus two sessions of muscle-strengthening activity.)

Globally, women are less active than men by an average of 5 per cent, a differential that has not changed for 25 years.

In 2022, I was certainly one of the 37 per cent (and also the 79 per cent, if it comes to that). But this year, I have hope. We’re just over a month into 2025: usually right around the time at which my usual round of brave new world of resolutions is lying in ashes at my feet. But this year things are looking, if not up, then at least different. In January, I began doing a large group exercise class called HIIT Pilates twice a week. Initially I thought this was just a trendy name (you know, it really hiiiits you) for ordinary Pilates, but now I realise it actually refers to High-Intensity Interval Training. The jury is out about what it’s doing to my body, but it’s certainly doing something: after my first class I couldn’t sit on the loo or walk downstairs for 48 hours.

I’ve also started a run club with some girlfriends. Our WhatsApp group is called Couch to Michelle Obama – which lacks alliterative flair but gives you a sense of the vision – and we have yet to actually go on a run, but several of these friends already do other forms of exercise (bike riding, tennis, circuit training), so I’m hoping they will nobly follow through and I will be drawn inexorably in their wake.

When I think about it, I do know a surprising number of impressively active women, though they seem to be well and truly outnumbered by active men. Apparently this is true everywhere: globally, women are less active than men by an average of 5 per cent, a differential that has not changed for 25 years. Women reach their peak – wrong word – of inactivity aged 65 and over; and in 2022 the AIHW recorded that almost half (41 per cent) of Australian women aged 18-64 were insufficiently active, compared to a third (34 per cent) of men.

And is it just me, or are men active for happier reasons than women? Where I’ve had only weight loss as my sole, gritted-teeth goal, my male friends seem motivated by the pleasure of running with mates; or playing touch rugby in a team; or doing something they love: kayaking, bushwalking, terrorising the neighbourhood in ill-advised lycra. Meanwhile, I – and women like me – approach exercise in the same spirit we might endure the London Blitz: with a kind of grim determination that does not disguise our passionate longing, every time we put on our leggings, for it to all, please god, be over very soon.

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Why should women be reluctant exercisers? We do know a discrepancy in motivation begins early. In a 2016 study of 555 students from 29 Canberra primary schools, researchers found that girls were almost 20 per cent less active than boys. They took 2000 fewer steps a day, had 18 per cent lower cardio-respiratory fitness and 44 per cent less hand-eye co-ordination than boys. This study also found that school was a stronger influence on boys’ activity than girls; and that by age 12, boys were receiving more encouragement from their parents to be active than girls were.

One study found that 41 per cent of Victorian women felt too embarrassed to exercise in public.Credit: Getty Images

This is only one small study from several years ago, but its findings are borne out by the enormous statistical reach of organisations like the Australian Sports Commission, which is responsible for the annual AusPlay survey that canvasses some 40,000 Australians on their sporting and exercise preferences. According to its July 2023 to June 2024 figures, some 15.3 per cent of women say they simply “don’t like sport”, compared to only 9.2 per cent of men. And in 2019, a research pamphlet produced by VicHealth found that 41 per cent of Victorian women “feel too embarrassed to exercise in public”. They are worried about “being sweaty; having a red face; not looking like I usually do (made up); changing in front of others; wearing tight clothing; wearing the wrong clothing; showing my body; how my body looks during exercise (jiggling); not appearing feminine”.

All this is certainly true: there are few more depressing things than believing, as you stagger through your burpees, that you look like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, only to catch sight of yourself in a gym mirror and realise how infinitely far you are from anything involving Skynet, or anyone not on the brink of apoplexy. Women compensate for these fears by choosing non-formal settings and arrangements for exercise (i.e. places where they can’t see themselves, and, preferably, other people can’t see them either). Only 9 per cent of women belong to sports clubs, compared to 17.1 per cent of men, says AusPlay. Women feel judged for “not being fit enough; not being good enough; not being competitive/serious enough; not knowing the rules; not knowing what equipment to bring; bringing the wrong equipment; holding back the group; being too good; being seen as too competitive/serious”. They are also put off from exercising by the fear of “developing too many muscles”.

As if putting on your bike shorts isn’t bad enough. I’ve suffered most of these fears, though it’s fair to say I’ve never been embarrassed by my outstanding ability or my wild competitive drive. Nor have I worried that my muscles might get accidentally too big. (As one personal trainer put it in an interview with journalist Maggie Alderson, that would be like worrying about getting your driver’s licence in case you accidentally win a grand prix.)

Men manage to preserve their time to exercise, regardless of the demands placed on them by work, kids and home life. Women do not.

As well as all these worries, women have particular barriers that stop them exercising at particular points in their lives. “Exercise really drops [for women] when they’re adolescents, and in midlife,” says Professor Lyndall Strazdins from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University. In 2022, Strazdins and her colleagues looked at exercise within some 7000 Australian heterosexual couples with children. They found that men manage to preserve their time to exercise, regardless of the demands placed on them by work, kids and home life. Women do not.

“As men’s hours at work go up, their family work [childcare, cooking, household tasks, etc] go down,” says Strazdins. It’s the woman in the couple who often “soaks up” those tasks at home, while men’s exercise time is unaffected. But when women work longer hours, men do not make up the home-front shortfall, and women exercise less. “As a woman, even if you work more hours, it does not buy you out of your family time. It’s locked in.”

Instead, women try to wrap exercise in with other tasks. “Women’s exercise time is known to be more fragmented relative to men’s because they’ll often try to combine childcare and exercise, for example.” Strazdins, who wears glasses and has a short pixie haircut, grimaces over Zoom: “I don’t know how often you’ve tried to take a toddler on a bike ride, but it is not relaxing, and it is not restorative. There’s a catastrophe every block.” Another example of multi-tasking is walking the dog: according to AusPlay, 24.4 per cent of women walk a dog for exercise, compared to only 16.9 per cent of men.

The need to combine childcare with exercise helps explain why women’s exercise routines tend to be more fragmented than men’s.Credit: Getty Images

The situation is complicated further by the fact that even when women do have time available for exercise, it’s often at night, after children are in bed and partners are home. And that’s not always conducive to a workout. “You’re tired, it’s late, it might not be safe.”

The final issue all this raises, says Strazdins, is the quality of women’s exercise. “If women are exercising in short, distracted bursts, is that as much use as a focused hour in the gym? And what about the psychological substrate that’s such an important part of exercise’s benefits? Is the exercise women are doing sociable? Is it safe? Are women feeling uncomfortable, guilty? All those things change the quality of the exercise. It’s not just time: it’s quality of time.”

This might be why women choose to do other things with their spare time than exercise. In my own life, it’s true that if I have the choice between going for a run or catching up with a friend over a glass of wine, I have rarely (OK, never) chosen the former. “It’s partly because women are seeking to solve a problem which is, ‘I’m not feeling great, I’m stressed, I’d like to have some support,’ ” says Strazdins. “So they’re prioritising mental over physical health.” Of course, there are significant mental health benefits to be gained from productive physical activity, so here in my month-old new world, I’m hoping that Michelle Obama et al can change that. But only time will tell.

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Exercise gurus, I am led to believe, will tell you that the worst moment in a workout is just before the endorphins kick in: you reach your absolute nadir of pain and exhaustion, then the dopamine hits and things suddenly feel fine. Or at least better. And so it is, perhaps, with exercise statistics. In the latest AusPlay figures last year, in among all the women disliking sport and avoiding sports clubs, there are also an enormous number of women taking the Nike approach, and just doing it. More women, in fact – on a yearly, monthly, weekly, even daily basis – than men. Between July 2023 and June last year, 9,174,379 women participated in exercise at least once. In the same period, 9,148,366 men did so: a differential of 26,000-odd in favour of women.

Of course, this is hardly a big differential. And it’s even smaller when you remember that this year’s results have been collected according to a new methodological system, which, as CEO of the Australian Sports Commission Kieren Perkins explains, means “we can’t compare data from previous years”. It’s also true, he adds, that with “more women than men making up the Australian population, you’d expect there to be more women participating in sport or physical activity than men”.

‘The more visible women are actually doing sport and exercise at all levels, the more it’s accepted that they can be involved.’

Professor Clare Hanlon

This is slightly deflating, but I’m sure Perkins doesn’t mean to rain on our parade. And despite these details, experts do agree that women appear to be closer to exercise parity with men than ever before. “It’s exciting,” says Professor Clare Hanlon of Victoria University, an expert in women in sport. While echoing Perkins’ point about methodological change, she acknowledges that we could, in fact, be witnessing a tipping point. “Do [these figures] mean that our sporting and exercise environments are now more accessible to women and girls, are more non-discriminatory?” she wonders. “Of course it depends on regional, local, specific figures, but is that happening? Is it working? Have we potentially managed to remove some of the gender barriers?”

On a national level, meanwhile, have things like the AFLW, women’s cricket, the FIFA Women’s World Cup and the Paris Olympics – where Australian female athletes won 13 of the country’s 18 golds, and 32 of the 53 medals overall – helped raise the profile and confidence of women doing sport? “Increased visibility certainly helps,” says Hanlon. “The more visible women are actually doing sport and exercise at all levels, the more it’s accepted that they can be involved. And the more they’re involved, as players and leaders, the more they have a chance to create a welcoming environment for other women and girls.

“There are still systemic gaps,” she warns. “There’s a lack of facilities for women, and accessible facilities for women with disabilities. In professional sports, there’s a big pay gap. There’s still sexism and gender bias. We still have a way to go, in other words. But we’re heading in the right direction.”

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What does all this mean for the average woman on the street – us, in other words? I suspect it means there are no longer any excuses we should accept, from ourselves or society, for not exercising. “It’s not a gender message,” says Hanlon. “It’s a human health message. If you want to be healthy, you must exercise.” I’m not far enough into my exercise “journey” to know if I can actually live by this mantra, but I’m convinced I need to try.

One final piece of good news. If, somehow, the stars come into alignment this year and I suddenly become an exercise demon, I – along with all women – can expect it to do me a disproportionate amount of good. In February last year, a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, following 412,413 participants recruited between 1997 and 2017, found that women gained greater benefits than men for doing the same amount of exercise. For example, doing 140 minutes of moderate exercise a week reduced women’s risk of premature all-cause death by 18 per cent compared with being inactive. Men, in contrast, needed more than double this amount – 300 minutes a week – to derive the same benefit. (No one seems sure why, but the facts that over time women gain relatively more muscle mass than men, and women have a relatively larger vasodilatory pattern, might be part of the answer.)

Here’s what Dr Susan Cheng, from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, one of the study’s co-authors, had to say to women when the results were announced. “We hope that perhaps just understanding this one concept can help some women who may feel too busy or too intimidated to take on a new exercise routine,” she said. “[Now they] know they do not need to compare how much or how hard they are working to men, or to anyone else for that matter. They can be on their own path to success, and every bit of progress will count.”

Susan, I love you. Want to join our run club?

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