You, Me, and Caitlin Clark: We Are All Culture Makers

Source: Finnian HaDiep / Unsplash

If you’re feeling down about change these days, one hopeful place to turn is women’s sports. Interest is surging, spanning college, pro, and international levels.

Where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, people are hot this summer with WNBA fever. The Golden State Valkyries, the league’s newest expansion team, has been a hit, selling out games and winning a broad fan base during its debut season. Has the moment finally arrived for women’s sports to attain parity?

Answering that question requires a wide-angle lens. Undoubtedly, positive change is sweeping the ecosystem of women’s sports in unprecedented ways, from rising audience numbers to increased revenue streams to better television deals. When it comes to big-time culture change, this kind of mutually reinforcing, system-wide shift is encouraging.

At the same time, there are tensions. Player salaries, for instance, still lag and are undergoing a major renegotiation. WNBA generational phenom, Caitlin Clark, is earning $78,066 in salary during her second season. By contrast, NBA phenom Victor Wembanyama just made $12.7 million in salary during his. While pro athletes also earn money through endorsements, sponsorships, and more, the salary gap matters, practically and symbolically.

Another concern, voiced by league stakeholders, is that the spotlight’s glare could pull focus away from the WNBA’s long-time progressive core values and social impact work. Could becoming more widely accepted and profitable cause “the W” to lose its edge, as its appeal broadens to include more sponsors and audiences?

These are essential culture change questions: When faced with a culture shift, what can people do to contribute to its trajectory? What can you do to influence or nudge change in the right direction?

We Are All Culture Makers

My first post introduced 7 Principles for Intentional Culture Change—an evidence-based, field-tested framework grounded in the science of culture and behavioral change. It invites changemakers of all stripes to ask seven key questions, informed by these principles, that empower them to motivate, activate, and achieve meaningful culture change.

The framework’s first principle is also its bedrock idea: People are shaped by—and in turn shape—culture. Because people built their cultures—from more local ones, like neighborhoods and workplaces, to broader ones, like sports leagues or nations—they also have the power to change them. People are born with this power; it’s also our legacy.

It can be easy, though, to doubt that power. Culture can seem like a mighty, even mythical force—“everything, everywhere, all at once”—shaping us and the world in mysterious and unpredictable ways, beyond human influence or control. Yet decades of social science research show that this simply isn’t the case.

While people are shaped by their cultures, they also have the power to shape and change those same cultures. The ideas, narratives, values, institutions, organizations, norms, policies, and practices that make up society and guide how we live are only the way they are because they’re human-made. Recognizing that powerful fact is the first, necessary step to intentional culture change. Since people built their cultures, collectively and cumulatively over time, people also have the power to remake those same cultures.

Consider the culture of women’s sports. Before Title IX, women and girls were widely excluded from participating in public or organized team sports; no laws or policies provided equitable access to resources or protection from discrimination. Gender, class, and race stereotypes conceived most forms of public exercise as dangerous, unfeminine, and inappropriate. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 marked a landmark shift in the U.S. by prohibiting sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance.

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Now, generations later, the culture of women’s sports is changing, and the fanbase is growing. That shift is far from incidental. Stakeholders like those in the WNBA, including many women, have been working steadily across time to shift the culture: in the legal, political, educational, and non-profit spheres to provide greater opportunities for women and girls; through media and marketing campaigns featuring role models, amazing feats of skill, and aspiring dreamers; and as athletes, coaches, executives, and other leaders sharing their stories and advocating for equity. Each action, each voice, in each space, cumulatively and collectively, has mattered.

Who Is Building Your Culture?

In ways big and small, we all have the ability to contribute to culture-making—you, me, and Caitlin Clark. Through our words and actions, we can uphold a culture, iterate on it, or resist it (sometimes without being aware of our impact). Learning to identify and recognize these behaviors—our own and those of others—is critical to being more intentional in how we contribute to, and shape, culture change.

So how can people become more aware of culture-making behaviors? When evaluating the opportunity for culture change, leaders and prospective changemakers should stop and pause to reorient their views. This intentional pause can open up the opportunity to notice assumptions and question defaults, to start perceiving the culture-making process at work.

First, ask: Who is building our culture? And should it be that way? Unpacking those questions involves asking a few more: Where did the culture come from? What is its status now? And looking ahead, where could and should it go next? How do people uphold, iterate on, or resist the culture? What role do I play? What role do I want to play?

To be sure, individual actions are only a part of culture change. Since culture is a dynamic system of ideas, narratives, values, institutions, organizations, norms, policies, and practices that shape us—and that we, in turn, shape—culture change must work across that system and those structures to be most effective. While some may wield more power or influence—due to resources, status, or the ability to marshal others—what we all say and do matters. Each of us has more power than we think.

Next in this series, we’ll explore the building blocks of culture, how they work together, and how to leverage them for more effective, durable, culture change.

Intentional Culture Change: 7 Key Principles

Source: MarYam Hamedani