# Who is the most influential woman in sports history?

> Medals sit next to lawsuits on this list. Two of them changed what a scoreboard could read; two changed what a contract could say.

*By YPB Team · Published August 23, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-most-influential-woman-in-sports-history*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Megan Rapinoe** — score 1000/1000
   Won World Cups and then the equal-pay case against her own federation, settled for $24m in 2022.
2. **Billie Jean King** — score 953/1000
   Built the women's professional tour from a boycott and a $1 contract, and won the exhibition that made it visible.
3. **Nadia Comaneci** — score 840/1000
   Scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics in 1976, at 14, and redefined what the sport looked like.
4. **Babe Didrikson Zaharias** — score 680/1000
   Won Olympic track golds, then ten major golf titles, and co-founded the LPGA in 1950.
5. **Serena Williams** — score 680/1000
   Won 23 singles majors and moved women's tennis prize money and audience to a scale nobody had reached.
6. **Danica Patrick** — score 600/1000
   The only woman to win an IndyCar race and to lead the Indianapolis 500, and the first to take a NASCAR Cup pole.
7. **Simone Biles** — score 507/1000
   The most decorated gymnast ever, who also made athlete mental health a subject federations had to answer for.
8. **Kathrine Switzer** — score 400/1000
   Ran Boston in 1967 while an official tried to pull her off the course, and helped get the women's marathon into the Olympics.
9. **Wilma Rudolph** — score 400/1000
   Won three golds in Rome in 1960 after childhood polio, and refused a segregated homecoming parade.
10. **Venus Williams** — score 273/1000
   Argued the case that pushed Wimbledon and Roland-Garros into equal prize money in 2007, thirty-four years after the US Open.
11. **Martina Navratilova** — score 273/1000
   Eighteen singles majors, a fitness regime that changed how women trained, and a public coming-out in 1981.
12. **Mia Hamm** — score 120/1000
   The face of the 1999 World Cup win that turned American women's soccer into a mass-audience sport.

Tags: sports, women, athletes