A few weeks ago, when my mom and I sauntered into the Hollister store in Vaughan Mills, two things struck me. First, the stark gender divide in clothing and, second, the tables and racks filled with Formula 1 (F1) merchandise.
Unfortunately, the numerous McLaren and Red Bull racing t-shirts, sweatpants, and jackets were only available on the men’s side of the store.
As a recently inducted F1 fan who does not have the budget for official F1 merchandise, I was excited to see what Hollister had to offer. Most of their items, however, were boxy and baggy, which doesn’t fit my style or body. I ended up leaving the store empty-handed and disappointed.
On the trip home, I questioned what Hollister was preaching and feeding into with their men forward F1 line. Of course, anyone can wear the merchandise, but Hollister’s inability to design inclusive F1 clothing reinforces how disregarded and disrespected women fans are in motorsports.Â
According to the official F1 Academy site, women make up 40% of the F1 fan base due in large part to the hit Netflix film Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which follows the various teams and drivers of F1 in a reality/documentary style. In 2023, Blackbook Motorsport reported that 46% of the show’s viewers were women.
Additionally, there has been an increase in the number of women fans who have been flocking to F1 Grand Prixs. In 2019, 20% of in-person fans were women, and that number has grown to almost a third since then, according to F1 Academy.Â
One of these fans is Sanya Sharma, a third-year fashion student at TMU with a vibrant enthusiasm for the sport. In a conversation with her, I learned that her journey into the motorsport world was quite similar to many other women fans, including myself.Â
She recalls first hearing of F1 through her uncle and thinking nothing of it. However, after seeing more social media posts regarding the sport, she took an interest. In 2020, Sharma started watching Drive to Survive and credits the COVID-19 pandemic as the start of her unadulterated fanaticism for F1. She refers to the sport as her “calling.”
In Sharma’s five-year-long investment into F1, she’s learned so much about the sport’s teams, technical operations, and more. However, her knowledge is often challenged by other male fans who claim that her interest purely stems from an attraction to the drivers or the aesthetics of car racing.
“They’ll ask me, ‘What’s your favourite team?’ or ‘Do you like it because of the hot guys?'” Sharma said, to which she replied, “Yes and no.”
There seems to be a belief that women F1 fans must prove their fanaticism, whereas it’s generally accepted that men find interest in the sport and never have to be questioned.
“It’s so ridiculous because you don’t see people doing that with basketball players and their stats, for example. That’s crazy; you wouldn’t bring that up in a conversation,” Sharma said.
The feeling that you must prove your worth to be part of a fandom is as ridiculous as Sharma shared. Unfortunately, it’s very common in many male-dominated fandoms like hockey or in popular culture fandoms like Star Wars.Â
Much of this prejudice stems from the stigma surrounding fangirl culture, which has existed for decades. The first extreme case of this phenomenon was in the ’60s when “Beatlemania” ran rampant — the fanaticism surrounding the English rock band the Beatles. More modern examples include “Bieber fever” — for Canadian pop-icon Justin Bieber — in the 2010s or Taylor Swift’s “Swifties” today.Â
The common belief surrounding these fangirls is that they are obsessive, erratic, or overexcited. While there have been extreme instances where fangirl behaviour becomes dangerous, many of these attributes purely stem from a deep-rooted inability to accept women’s interests as valuable.
Many women exhibit the same passion as men yet somehow end up categorized under the title of fangirl, which holds negative gender roles and stereotypes. For example, correlating boy bands like One Direction with femininity and calling it “girly” dictates that women should be engaging with their content. On the other hand, attributing sports and activities with masculinity ushers women away from these spaces and encourages men to perform in a specific way.
So, when a woman then enters a male-dominated fandom like F1, their passion is challenged because it doesn’t fit these common gender roles. That is why, in many cases, including Sharma’s, women’s interest is attributed to superficial interest to offer a more succinct and “believable” gender-role-conforming explanation for why a woman enters this space.
Sharma recognizes the mistreatment of female F1 fans: “It feels like you’re not really a fan at all,” she said. “There isn’t an expectation to know all these different things about [F1]. Even if you do, it gets dismissed in a way because you’re a woman in a guy’s sport.”Â
She further questions this boy-obsessed narrative many like to push about F1 fangirls.
“Why then, if Lewis Hamilton is my favourite driver, it’s just because he’s attractive? He is, but he’s also a great driver,” she said.Â
Seven-time Formula One World Drivers’ Championship winner Lewis Hamilton is no doubt a beast on the track, so Sharma’s decision is not frivolous. It’s often forgotten that two things can be true at the same time. You can admire a driver’s skills while also finding them attractive. Further, just because you find them attractive does not lessen your credibility as a fan.
In the final moments of my conversation with Sharma, she triumphantly boasts, “Put some respect on the fangirl’s name!” And she’s right. Without fangirl culture, communities would not be formed, friendships would not be made, and economies would not thrive.
When F1’s Instagram or TikTok content is obviously made to cater to their women audience members, like thirst traps, they are keeping women engaged with the sport as well. Sharma evokes that this is very profitable for F1 and its sponsors because “now they can get women buying merch, buying tickets, and flying out.”
Under these same posts, you’ll find countless women commenting and replying to one another over their shared interests. Creating spaces like this for women in male-dominated sports shows them what hobbies and even jobs are available to them. Women can pursue engineering or broadcasting positions in F1, for example, and this is all bred from how F1 welcomes spaces for women through their promotional methods.
That is why walking into Hollister was so disheartening; they were saying that women don’t exist in F1, and they prevented any opportunity for women to enter this community, too.
So I ask, why does society deny us this pleasure of indulging in F1? We all share the same interests; we just happen to be women.
As Sharma said, “It’s a beautiful thing to love something so much and to have that community.” F1’s fanbase has the potential to move from male-dominated to equally dominated, and if they embrace this rather than critique it, it will become the inspiring sport it is destined to be.