94% of women female leaders played sports at a young age. There’s no better example than General Motors CEO, Mary Barra, who broke the gender leadership bias in the automotive industry by becoming the first and only female CEO to lead a major automaker. Under Mary’s leadership, GM has adopted a women-empowered culture, whose aim supports girls and women to achieve their full potential.

However, a global problem is that young girls are dropping out of sports and giving up on their goals at twice the rate of boys due to social pressures.

To inspire and empower the next generation of women leaders, we knew we had to keep girls in sports. We asked ourselves, how can we use our partnership with Manchester United, our most powerful global voice (659 million fans), to raise awareness of girls quitting sports and increase the percentage of girls to stay in sports?

Care. Don’t Care: Be a Goalkeeper – a global rally cry and ongoing program; supporting girls to set goals and keep them.

On International Women’s Day, we teamed up with Women’s Sports Foundation and Manchester United; launching a global rallying cry to break the barriers of girls in sports to encourage them to care about their goals and don’t care about anything that gets in their way. Using the unexpected voices of Manchester United soccer players, we cut through and raised awareness of girls quitting sports at twice the rate of boys, to address the issue together.

To share our message, we recruited 11 at-risk girls for a week of teaching, training and mentoring. We paired them with female leaders in STEM and sports. The girls found that scoring goals on the pitch leads to scoring goals in life. Ultimately, inspiring countless young girls all over the world.

Our problem was that globally, young girls are dropping out of sports and giving up on their goals at twice the rate of boys due to negative influences and barriers.

When we asked them why we found that it’s because it’s things like the fear of being judged that causes girls to lose sight of reaching their goals.

We sought to inspire and empower the next generation of women leaders to stay in sport and pursue their goals. We found that 94% of women female leaders played sports at a young age (Ernst & Young Study). Through Chevrolet’s ingenuity and the never give up spirit, we enabled young girls to make the most of every mile along life’s journey to Find New Roads.

The Goalkeepers program had two iterations. Phase one ran October 2017 – May 2018 and phase two was October 2018 through May 2019. For phase two, we teamed up with the Women’s Sports Foundation and Manchester United. On International Women’s Day, instead of just talking about female empowerment we unleashed the power they already had with a global rallying cry to encourage girls to care about their goals and the things that help you reach them.

We worked with US Olympic Soccer Player, Mia Hamm to spread the message.

We worked with Manchester United players to bring awareness to the fact girls are quitting sports at twice the rate of boys; emphasizing everyone should be concerned.

“We believed that the more activities we could engage these girls to give them the self-belief and determination to actually show there’s no reason why they can’t succeed.” Emphasized sports scientist, Dr. Naomi Datson

Transforming 11 more girls into Goalkeepers with over 3,663,256 engagements and over 94,216,028 views.

“I loved meeting the women because they gave me a lot of confidence. It shows that women can do things as well as men.” – Goalkeeper

Ad recall +22% and brand attribution +35% rating among female audience (GM Integrated Data and Analytics, 2018).

Goalkeepers increased female attribution by 35pp across the 4 markets that were measured (GM Integrated Data and Analytics, 2018).

Goalkeepers increased ad recall rate among women by 22pp across the 4 markets measured (GM Integrated Data and Analytics, 2018).