Driven by Parity: Has Gender Parity Become Formula 1’s Favourite Soft Power Shield?
More than ever now, in 2026, Formula 1 is walking a fine line between its genuine ESG commitments - including gender diversity - and its lucrative corporate alignment with authoritarian state capitals. On the one hand, the sport actively promotes gender diversity as a core corporate value. Meanwhile the sport simultaneously accepts multi-million-dollar host-city fees from governments that have historically suppressed women’s rights.
In March 2024, the all-female F1 Academy held its season opener at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Saudi Arabia. Here it featured the local wild-card entry, Reema Juffali, as the nation's first ever female professional racing driver. This creates the compelling narrative that F1 is trying to make progressive changes and incorporate modern values into the sport by directly empowering women inside Saudi Arabia. This, by turn, signals to Western audiences and corporate sponsors that Saudi Arabia is modernising and that F1 is a force for driving social change - a win-win.
However, by staging this spectacle in a country where grassroots female activists, such as Loujain al-Hathlou, were previously jailed or silenced for advocating for this exact same right (the basic right to drive), it ultimately highlights a profound systematic contradiction; despite the grand spectacle on the racetrack, legal and social liberties off the track remain strictly policed by the state.
This contrast conveys that female representation on the track risks being used as a PR shield or ‘genderwashing’, in which a state uses F1's progressive gender branding to polish its global reputation, while F1 itself gains multi-million-dollar hosting fees. Where ultimately, real activists off the track do not receive the same liberation that the drivers on the track represent.
However this is not to dismiss the F1 Academy as a marketing stunt. Launched under Managing Director Susie Wolff, the racing series provides a tangible bridge for female talent into high-level single-seater racing that hasn't existed before, through providing real financial and technical backing to female drivers who are in desperate need of it.
F1 Academy mandates that all Formula 1 teams have to directly adopt, fund and run their liveries on F1 Academy cars. This initiative guarantees track time and financial backings to both the drivers and the teams, which is the primary economic barrier holding female drivers back.
This builds on a pivotal milestone in 2022 where drivers Abbi Pulling and Aseel Al Hamad made history by driving Alpine’s E20 car through the streets of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia during both promotional and race events. They were the first ever women to pilot an F1 car in a country which only lifted the ban on women driving regular cars in 2018.
As F1 Academy is integrated into the weekend schedule of main F1 Grand Prix to save logistic costs, the racing series progress is bound to the scheduling choices of the high-paying host nations. Female drivers are essentially directly imported into authoritarian host states as part of a broader ‘event package’ rather than independent athletes. This dynamic gives commercial rights holders significant leverage over the narrative. Critics note that if the series were to boycott races in regions with poor human rights records, F1 could argue that doing so would deprive young female drivers of a global platform. In effect, authentic athletic progress serves as an operational defense for lucrative commercial contracts.
Authoritarian state investors are increasingly using gender equality in global sports as a diplomatic tool to appeal to liberal Western markets and audiences. Sovereign wealth funds, such as Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), utilise elite sport investments across international sport to signal economic modernisation and social reform. While traditional ‘sportswashing’ typically uses male athletic excellence to soften the particular nation's human rights image, ‘gender-washing’ specifically targets Western social values, reassuring international investors and governments that a state is socially modern and commercially safe.
This strategic image-building coincides with deep governance contradictions within motorsport itself. In early 2024, F1 Academy Director Susie Wolff filed a criminal complaint in the French courts against the FIA, following a dropped conflict-of-interest inquiry. This was a move publicly supported by drivers like Lewis Hamilton, who criticized the institution's lack of internal transparency and accountability.
This highlights that the battle for gender parity is fought on two distinct fronts, externally on the racetrack and internally against legacy governing structures. It is inconsistent for international sports bodies to champion progressive values in host states while their own internal leadership structures remain non-transparent and resistant to female executive authority.
True progress in women's motorsport cannot be simply measured purely by high-visibility appearances on foreign street circuits. While the inclusion of drivers like Reema Juffali in Jeddah does represent a large step forward for representation of women within a motorsport paddock, it simultaneously operates alongside systemic legal restrictions and human rights infringements of women across host states. Female inclusion in elite sports should not function as a PR shield for corporate or state commercial interests. For motorsport to achieve genuine gender equity, the FIA and other motorsport governing institutions must ensure that there is institutional transparency and human rights protections off the track, to match the progress displayed on it.
By Amelia Scott
Sources:
https://www.independent.co.uk/f1/saudi-arabia-women-cars-driving-b2043099.html
https://apnews.com/article/fa-susie-wolff-fia-legal-action-85e4a6eb3ef42d879d4ffdd25ca02102
