Rosalin Kuiper says she stops being a woman at sea and becomes one again on land. She blames the media. She should blame the business model.
The Rule That Disappears at the Dock
Gender parity in sailing hit a new high-water mark on 2 September, when six IMOCA 60s began racing after departing Brooklyn the previous day — crews of exactly two men and two women sailing under the first mandatory 50/50 gender-equal crew rule in the Ocean Race’s 53-year history. However, the most revealing thing said about the rule came not from an organiser but from Rosalin Kuiper, the Dutch offshore sailor who skippered Team Holcim-PRB at The Ocean Race Europe 2025 and raced around the world with Team Malizia in 2022–23. In a recent interview, she described her experience of gender parity in sailing with disarming precision: “I just feel like a team member and I feel like I’m a valuable team member who is just sailing around the world.” Yet the moment she comes ashore, the feeling evaporates. “when you step back on land, you realize, oh, I’m a woman because you hear it from the media.”
Kuiper treats this as a residual irritation — the last stubborn stain that the rule hasn’t quite lifted. She notices gender becomes visible again through media framing. It is actually the central problem. And it is structural.
The Commercial Architecture of Difference
Every major sailing property now builds part of its sponsorship pitch around female participation. The Ocean Race Atlantic’s 50/50 crew rule was announced alongside the appointment of 11th Hour Racing as Impact Partner, a deal framed explicitly around equity, inclusion and ocean science. Teams are scored against 30 sustainability criteria, and diversity is among them. Meanwhile, SailGP’s chief purpose officer, Fiona Morgan, has stated plainly that brands expect diversity as a condition of sponsorship. “I don’t think many brands nowadays will go into sponsorship that doesn’t have diversity or equity at some point in it,” she told CNBC in March 2025. The 38th America’s Cup, for the first time in its 175-year history, requires at least one female crew member on each AC75 — and has scheduled its Women’s America’s Cup alongside the main event in Naples, maximising the broadcast spotlight.
None of this is cynical. These are genuine steps. Yet they share a common feature: they require gender to remain loudly visible in the very media spaces where Kuiper says it re-emerges as a category. The rule works by making gender invisible at sea. The business model works by making gender impossible to miss on land.
The rule works by making gender invisible at sea. The business model works by making gender impossible to miss on land.
What the Rule Has Actually Done
To be fair to the rule, it has done remarkable things. The Ocean Race went from 18% female participation in 2014–15 to 21% in 2017–18 and 28% in 2022–23, and now to an enforced 50% for the Atlantic race. Paul Meilhat, skipper of United by the Ocean, exceeded the minimum gender requirement on three of seven legs during the 2022–23 circumnavigation and has expressed an ambition to maintain 50/50 crews going forward. Francesca Clapcich, the first Italian to win the Ocean Race, is now skippering her own IMOCA project. SailGP has required at least one female athlete per team since 2021 and Martine Grael became the first female driver in the league’s history in the 2024-25 season.
Kuiper herself is proof the rule works. She began professional offshore racing around 2018 — roughly eight years ago, not the ten she mentions in the interview — on boats where she was frequently the sole woman aboard. “I felt the only woman on board because I literally was the only woman,” she says. By the time she entered IMOCA racing, the culture had shifted. She does not attribute that shift to goodwill alone. She credits the rule — even as she hopes it will eventually become unnecessary. “At one point you hope there you know the rule is not needed anymore.”
The Paradox Nobody Mentions
Here is the tension sailing’s governing bodies and commercial partners have not confronted. The rule exists to dissolve the salience of gender. Yet every event’s commercial model depends on amplifying exactly that salience. When the Ocean Race scores teams on diversity, equity and inclusion as part of a sustainability challenge, it is telling sponsors: our female sailors are a measurable asset. When SailGP markets its inclusion initiatives as part of its broader appeal to sponsors, it is monetising the visibility of women racing on F50s. When the America’s Cup frames the female crew requirement as an inspirational focal point for the event, it is selling the distinction.
This is not villainy. It is commerce. Sponsors want to associate with progress. Progress, in this context, means women competing visibly. Visibility means being named, highlighted and counted as women — which is precisely what Kuiper says she no longer experiences at sea.
Kuiper mentions the America’s Cup and SailGP by name as events she hopes will follow the offshore model. “I just hope that this can be an example for other races as well for America’s Cup for SailGP,” she says. Yet both events already have female mandates. What they also have is an economic incentive to keep framing those mandates as remarkable. If the transatlantic sprint currently underway proves the 50/50 rule can work seamlessly, the business side of the sport will face an uncomfortable question: what happens to the sponsorship narrative when gender parity in sailing stops being a story?
The Strongest Counter-Argument
The obvious rebuttal is that visibility is the engine of change. You cannot normalise something people cannot see. Martine Grael helming a foiling catamaran on global broadcast matters because girls in São Paulo and Sydney see it. Francesca Clapcich running her own IMOCA campaign matters because it rewrites the mental template of who leads an offshore crew. The commercial model does not undermine the rule; it funds the infrastructure that makes the rule enforceable.
This is a serious argument and partially correct. However, it has an expiry date. At some point — the point Kuiper herself imagines — the rule should become invisible. The commercial model never wants that moment to arrive, because the moment gender parity becomes unremarkable is the moment it loses its value as a sponsorship differentiator. The incentive structure, in other words, is rigged against the rule’s own stated goal.
Where the Wind Goes From Here
Sailing is further along than almost any other sport. The Ocean Race Atlantic boats now racing toward Lorient carry genuinely equal crews in a genuinely competitive context. The 38th America’s Cup will, for the first time, put a woman on every AC75 when racing begins in Naples next year. SailGP continues to push boundaries — its Women’s Pathway has moved from a token seat to a programme that now counts drivers and grinders among its alumni. These are not gestures. They are structural reforms.
But Kuiper’s throwaway observation deserves to be treated as something more than a footnote. She has identified the exact fault line between sport and spectacle. At sea, gender parity in sailing is already real. On land, the sport needs it to remain aspirational — because aspiration is what sells. Until the commercial architecture evolves to value parity as a norm rather than a narrative, the rule will keep doing its job in the one place the sponsors cannot see: offshore, in the dark, with nobody watching.
Responding to remarks by Rosalin Kuiper, speaking here.
