Aging & Wisdom Quote by Billie Jean King

King’s point lands because it’s not dressed up as theory; it’s the blunt, lived diagnosis of someone who spent her career watching talent lose to gatekeeping. “Old boy network” is a deliberately unglamorous phrase, more clubhouse than boardroom, and that’s the tell: power isn’t just policies or pay scales, it’s access - who gets invited in, who gets mentored, who gets forgiven for mistakes. By calling it “still very strong and very true,” she’s swatting away the most common defense of entrenched inequality: that it’s basically solved, that the remaining gaps are personal choice or pipeline issues.

The stock exchange example is doing double work. It’s concrete enough to shut down abstraction - you can count bodies on a trading floor or in executive suites - and it’s culturally loaded. Finance is where a society’s priorities get priced, rewarded, and replicated; pointing to that arena implies that men aren’t just overrepresented, they’re positioned as the default stewards of value. Her rhetorical question - “how many men and women are there” - isn’t seeking an answer. It’s a dare to look, because the numbers are the argument.

Coming from an athlete, this hits with extra force. Sports markets itself as meritocracy: performance decides. King, who helped force equal prize money conversations into the mainstream, is underscoring that meritocracy is fragile when the referees, owners, sponsors, and decision-makers share the same social ties. The subtext is impatient: if the scoreboard still reads overwhelmingly male in the places that allocate capital, then “progress” is often just better branding.