From Mountain Agency to Self-Agency: Building the Next Generation of Women in the Ski Industry

The ski industry has made meaningful progress in creating opportunities for women, but women continue to be underrepresented in many areas of winter sports, particularly in operations, technical positions, and senior leadership. The gap begins even before we look at employment. According to 2026 data from Snowsports Industries America, only 35 percent of new skiers and snowboarders are women, meaning men represent nearly two-thirds of those entering the sport.

While comprehensive national data on gender across the ski industry workforce is limited, the industry has long recognized the need to increase the number of women entering and advancing in careers throughout winter sports. If we want that representation to change, we need to think beyond recruiting more women for open positions today and consider how we create a stronger pipeline of girls who can see a future for themselves in this industry.

At Winter4Kids, we believe that process can begin through what we call Mountain Agency, the experience-based belief that you can navigate uncertainty and overcome obstacles. When young people learn to ski or snowboard, they are constantly making decisions, adapting to changing conditions, working through challenges, and discovering through experience that they are capable of doing things that once felt difficult or impossible.

For girls, those experiences can have an impact well beyond learning a sport. Each time a girl approaches something unfamiliar, determines how she is going to navigate it, falls and tries again, or accomplishes something she was initially unsure she could do, she is building evidence of her own ability. Over time, the confidence that begins with learning a new skill can develop into something broader: a belief that she can trust herself when faced with challenges and uncertainty.

Olympic champion Eileen Gu has spoken about this idea in a way that captures the connection between confidence and self-agency: “Find your passion and trust yourself more than those judging you externally. If you love something and you really want to do it, the only voice that matters is yours.”

Her words are particularly relevant when considering the future of women in the ski industry because self-agency is about more than confidence. It is the belief that you have the ability to determine your own direction and the willingness to act on those decisions, even when the path in front of you may not look like the path others have taken.

For Winter4Kids CEO Judie Rullis, the connection is also personal. Having built her career in winter sports and now serving as a female CEO within the industry, she believes that girls need opportunities to see women in positions throughout winter sports while developing the confidence to envision those opportunities for themselves.

“When girls see women in positions of responsibility throughout the ski industry, it changes what they believe is possible for themselves. Our responsibility is not only to introduce girls to skiing and snowboarding, but to give them experiences that help them develop the confidence to know there can be a place for them throughout this industry. Mountain Agency gives young people the opportunity to learn that they can trust themselves, work through challenges, and have a voice in determining what comes next,” said Rullis.

That connection is closely tied to Empowerment, one of the core components of Winter4Kids’ RISE framework. Through experiences in winter sports, Winter4Kids works to help young people develop greater self-awareness and confidence so they can make decisions, persist through adversity, and engage with the world with a stronger understanding of their own capabilities.

As an industry, introducing more girls to skiing and snowboarding remains important, but participation should be viewed as the beginning rather than the ultimate goal. We should also be asking whether the girls learning to ski today can imagine themselves becoming tomorrow’s instructors, coaches, patrollers, groomers, snowmakers, equipment technicians, operations professionals, executives, and industry leaders.

Creating that future requires more than waiting until women enter the workforce to begin thinking about representation. It requires exposing girls to the variety of careers available within winter sports and giving them opportunities to see women succeeding in those roles. Representation allows a young person to recognize what is possible, while agency helps her believe those possibilities can include her.

Winter sports provide a unique environment for developing that agency because uncertainty and challenge are naturally part of the experience. Conditions change, skills take time to develop, and young people encounter situations that require them to assess what is happening and determine how to move forward. Rather than removing those challenges, we can give young people the support and opportunity to discover that they are capable of navigating them.

For a young girl learning to ski or snowboard for the first time, the immediate goal may be developing the skills necessary to participate successfully, but the experience can teach her something much greater about herself. She can learn that she is capable of making decisions, taking appropriate risks, recovering when things do not go as planned, and trusting herself to determine what comes next.

If we want more women to see the ski industry as a place where they can build careers and eventually lead, creating those opportunities begins long before the first job application. It begins by giving girls experiences that allow them to discover what they are capable of while showing them that careers throughout winter sports are possibilities they can consider for themselves.

The connection between Mountain Agency and self-agency gives us an opportunity to think differently about how we develop the next generation. By helping girls build that sense of agency today, we can help create a ski industry in which more women participate, pursue careers, and have a meaningful role in shaping its future.

On March 8, Winter4Kids will celebrate International Women’s Day by recognizing the women who are making an impact across the ski industry and inspiring the next generation of girls to see what is possible. Join us for a day of skiing and snowboarding as we celebrate women in winter sports and create opportunities for more girls to see themselves as part of the industry’s future.