Pro female climbers are achieving at the highest levels. Competition climbing’s most dominant athlete is a woman: two-time Olympic champion Janja Garnbret. In outdoor climbing, the gap between the hardest-ever climbs by men and women is minimal (5.15d versus 5.15c, and V17 versus V16). Some take this as evidence that the sport has overcome its unsavory history of sexism.
It hasn’t.
While, as early as 2015, some male climbers began arguing that paying special attention to things like first female ascents (FFAs) was no longer necessary and that any misogyny lingering within climbing was just a reflection of society at large, those claims rang hollow for me. Despite all the impressive achievements of women, I can’t shake the feeling that declaring the sport’s victory over misogyny is premature.
Examples of continued sexism range from the extreme (allowing a rapist to go unchecked for years; the continued abuse by male coaches of female youth athletes), to the everyday slights I experienced first-hand — from being excluded by male climbers because I didn’t climb a certain grade, to being followed around the gym by a stranger who wouldn’t leave me alone).
The list goes on.
I spoke with six elite female climbers about the state of gender, sexism, and equity in the sport. Women have proven themselves equals in climbing ability, but still face harassment for their bodies, judgment about taking risks, and apathy about their accomplishments.
The Outlier vs. the Mean: Katie Lamb
Katie Lamb has long been a crusher, sending hard boulders left and right. She rose to greater prominence in the climbing community when she became the first woman to send V16 — twice. In 2023, she sent Box Therapy, which had been rated V16.
Later, other climbers, including Brooke and Shawn Raboutou, climbed it and downgraded it to a V15. In 2025, she sent The Dark Side, another V16, cementing her place in climbing history. If her accomplishments inspire other women, that’s all well and good, but Lamb doesn’t choose boulders to pursue honorifics of the “first woman to …”
“If that title is the end goal, to me, I think it would feel like too much pressure or not quite genuine,” she said.
While Lamb is perhaps the golden example of the great achievements women can reach in bouldering, she bristles at the idea that the sport has reached equity.
“I felt a little bit frustrated recently about the idea that women are catching up to men more so than ever because I think it actually doesn’t necessarily feel that way in a broader sense,” she said. “It’s no fault of women, but in the gym, the average woman is not as good as the average man.”
Visit a commercial bouldering gym on any given night, and you’ll likely see more men than women. According to 2019 data from the American Alpine Club, 58% of indoor climbers are male, and 42% are female. Head outside to climb, and that gap widens to 67% and 32%.
“It feels like it does a disservice to say that women have caught up to men. That may be in the outlier case, but over my 20 years of climbing, it doesn’t feel like that gap in the mean has has closed that much.”
And it’s important to note that the gender gap may differ vastly depending on where the gym is located. The membership split of a gym in a climbing-centric place like Boulder, Colo., is going to look very different than one in the Midwest, for example.
As a decade-long Midwest resident, I’ve spent plenty of time in gyms in smaller cities without much of an outdoor culture, and Lamb’s statements definitely ring true there. When living in Des Moines, Iowa, it was common to look around a bouldering gym on a busy evening and be the only woman present.
While of course many male climbers are kind and welcoming, it can be hard to convince yourself to boulder when it can involve a man nonstop chatting with you because he saw your profile on a dating app (yes, this happened).
Female climbers at the pro level are climbing almost just as hard as their male counterparts, but are these outliers representative of gender in climbing as a whole?
In the Age of Social Media: Sasha DiGiulian
There is perhaps no better example of the intertwining of social media and climbing than Sasha DiGiulian, who grew up in the sport as social media became dominant. She recalled that she downloaded Instagram in 2011, the same year she won overall gold at the IFSC World Championships.
Of course, social media has its benefits; it’s allowed DiGiulian to build a career for herself (she currently has over 485,000 Instagram followers). But with that success, DiGiulian has experienced all the downsides of media attention: bullying, harassment, and more.
While people across the gender spectrum receive online hate and trolling, there is something particularly gendered about what’s happened to DiGiulian, to the extent that she calls it “traumatic.”
People felt free to comment on her body and speculate whether she had an eating disorder. “I knew it had been a conversation like online forums when I was like 18 or 19 years old, with people publicly talking about whether or not I got my period,” she said.
While these comments didn’t stop DiGiulian, she imagines it would, understandably, give pause to some teenage girls. “I think we do lose a lot of women to that, and it’s unfortunate,” she said.
And it’s not just DiGiulian. Michaela Kiersch (who has sent 5.15 and V15) regularly posts compilations on her Instagram of sexist comments she receives, which range from “lose about 20 pounds” to “bet she looks great naked” to “she looks heavy too — her fingers must be strong enough to kill me.”
Talking with DiGiulian, I was struck by a conversation I had a year ago with a male friend about a gold-medal–winning female comp climber. I brought up her name and how cool I thought she was, and immediately was met with, “Oh, well, she has an eating disorder. That’s why she wins,” he said.
I was taken aback by how easily someone could speculate so wildly on a woman’s body. Even after I pushed back, he stood firm, saying that a professional athlete’s body is always up for public comment.
Eating disorders live in a matrix that so clearly demonstrates the sport’s problems with gender: quick judgments, demonization of women, and zero desire to actually help solve a very real problem.
The Motherhood Question: Emily Harrington
Emily Harrington is no stranger to the question of gender and climbing; after all, her documentary covering her ascent of Golden Gate on El Capitan is called Girl Climber. When she became pregnant, what would become of her climbing career weighed on her: How would having a child change her risk tolerance?
“I didn’t want to believe it before I had kids,” she said. “I was really afraid at first and it was hard for me to not want to do the things,” she said.
Eventually, she came to peace with her new thought process. “It’s just an equation that you do naturally. I still love climbing. There are other disciplines [besides big walls] that I can explore that still challenge and push me. It does change without a doubt, it does change and it does change more for women than it does for men.”
For Harrington, famed mountaineer Hilaree Nelson was a major role model in her life. Nelson, a mother of two, continued to go on expeditions until her death from an avalanche in 2022.
“She kept pushing herself and she kept fighting and trying really hard [after having kids] and I think one of the hurdles that women have faced in particular is sort of like becoming a bit forgotten once they have children and have a family,” she said.
Nelson faced wide criticism for continuing to be an active alpinist after having children, one of many women to face such critiques. In Harrington’s ideal world, women who decide to have children are free to take whatever path they’d like, and balance motherhood with risk according to their own internal compass.
When it comes to fatherhood, some men do face criticism. Alex Honnold, for example, regularly receives negative social media comments for continuing to free solo once he had children, but that likely owes also to the extreme nature of free soloing and Honnold’s position as the world’s most famous climber.
And of course, male climbers who are fathers might alter their risk assessment in light of their role as a parent. In Reel Rock 14, Tommy Caldwell decided to bring extra protection while trying to set the speed record on The Nose with Honnold, attempting to be safer for the sake of his kids.
If any female climber becomes pregnant, however, one of the first questions they receive is if they’re going to continue to climb, both during and after the pregnancy. Imagine all of the pressure and judgment pregnant women receive, and then multiply that several times over as a professional athlete whose livelihood comes from her body.
The Pressure to Prove It: Nina Williams
Highball boulders — very tall boulders in which falls would be extremely dangerous — are Nina Williams’ bread and butter. She rose to prominence for her FFAs on Too Big To Flail (V10) and Evilution Direct (V11).
Back when Williams was working on these boulders in the mid-2010s, in addition to the beauty and movement of these lines, the FFA was part of their draw.
“To put my name in the history books in some way and push the idea around how much danger women can handle, that was really appealing to me,” she said. “It was a little bit of ‘I want to show people who think women are scared and women can’t do these tall things, I want to prove them wrong.'”
Now, Williams sees the matter differently. She no longer feels the need to prove herself.
“I don’t want anyone going in and needing to prove or do anything bigger or more dangerous. It’s all about the motivation, really,” she said. “But I do want women to push themselves and to see a little bit of my determination and focus in themselves and be inspired by that to go pursue … their own goals that they want to achieve.”
Even though she’s matured and feels content with her climbing, she does feel the pressure of being a model. She broke her foot bouldering in Squamish this summer and was concerned about how people might interpret her injury. As the name synonymous with women in highballing, she worried people would latch onto the accident as evidence that women didn’t belong in that discipline. If the legendary Nina Williams can’t highball safely, what woman can?
“It’s coming from this idea of having to be an example, a perfect model of a woman in highball climbing. Any kind of mistake such as getting injured is this huge mistake. Like it just proves that I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing and therefore, women shouldn’t climb highballs. It’s a subconscious projection that people in my life and society are telling me.”
Finding a Female Partner: Kate Kelleghan & Laura Pineau
Each discipline in climbing has its own culture and norms, and there is no more niche — and dangerous — subset of the sport than big wall speed climbing, where people race to climb huge walls like Yosemite’s El Capitan in as short a time period as possible.
It’s the ultimate test of technical skill, endurance, strength, and speed.
In 2025, Kate Kelleghan and Laura Pineau became the first women to complete the Yosemite Triple (scaling three iconic park landmarks in a 24-hour period: The Nose, Half Dome, and Mount Watkins). While Yosemite has seen many women’s climbing achievements, speed has been a boys’ club for a long time — so much so that Kelleghan had all but given up on finding a female partner to do the triple with before meeting Pineau.
There were several high-profile accidents involving women speed climbing (Quinn Brett became paralyzed after an accident on The Nose in 2017) that Kelleghan believed played a role in contributing to men dominating the field.
“It was definitely really traumatic, and kind of took the wind out of the sails for a lot of women who were chasing goals in that field at that time,” Kelleghan said.
For her, finding a female partner was a top priority. “There’s just stereotypical norms that bleed into everything we do with in regards to gender when climbing,” she said. “Men often feel like they have to carry the team, or they’re the stronger person. They’re carrying more weight, they’re making the decisions.”
In her eyes, this leaves women in a second-fiddle, delegatory kind of role.
Partnering with Pineau meant there was no bravado or ego about gear placements. The duo was able to talk through their fears, and balance speed and safety.
“We had a lot of in-depth conversations and emotional conversations in the time that we got to know each other,” Kelleghan said. “Being vulnerable and being like, ‘I don’t want to ditch this piece. I want to bring the offset. I want this extra margin.’ Knowing I could communicate about those things with her was definitely a huge bonus.”
In a way, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Women may feel more comfortable speed climbing with other women, but if they can’t find partners, they pull back, and thus the cycle continues. It took Kelleghan 2 years to find Pineau, who was an experienced big wall climber, but had never speed climbed.
Despite women’s many, many accomplishments in Yosemite, for Kelleghan, who has worked on the area’s SAR team, it’s still very much a boy’s club.
“Most of the climbers that I meet there [in Yosemite] are men, and mostly white men, so I think it is important to show representation and celebrate that representation,” she said.
And it’s not just a problem in speed climbing. Alpinism is such a male-dominated discipline that Masha Gordon started Grit & Rock, a nonprofit focused on supporting women in alpinism. Since launching in 2017, it’s given women over $100,000 to help them make their mark in the field.
And it can even be an issue in the gym. I’ve been climbing for over 5 years, and all of my consistent, regular belay partners have been men. Despite my best efforts, I’ve never been able to find a female sport climbing partner, and I’d love one.
While my male partners are wonderful, I can imagine all of the practical and emotional benefits of climbing with someone who is also under 5’7″ and can help figure out beta for a reachy move, or someone who can relate when I tell them about a misogynistic comment I received.
The fact that I live in smaller Midwestern cities that lack the huge climbing culture of the Mountain West probably doesn’t help, but I still daydream about what it’d be like to take on a hard climb with another woman at the other end of my rope.
The Next Generation
While women have come a long way in climbing, it can still be easy to feel pessimistic about the current state of the sport. Just last week, a pro climber received 6 months of jail time (out of a possible 8 years) for three felony convictions of domestic violence, and he’s still got 47K Instagram followers.
Whenever I hear news like this, I feel grateful that I have the perfect antidote: coaching a youth climbing team. A team full of teenage girls and boys of varying ability levels sounds like it could be a well of drama, but the group is anything but. Sixteen-year-old boys who can climb V10 cheer on their teammates projecting a V3 with joy and enthusiasm. The fact that a girl on the team can flash most of the boys’ projects doesn’t produce any semblance of ego, pride, or misogyny.
As I watch these young athletes cultivate a supportive, nurturing community, I’m hopeful that, with time, climbing can fulfill its potential as a gender-equal sport where everyone feels seen and has the opportunity to succeed.
