Billie Jean King Accepts Gleitsman Award, Urges Students to Continue Fight for Equity

Tennis icon Billie Jean King accepted the 2026 Gleitsman Citizen Activist Award at the Harvard Kennedy School on Tuesday, reflecting on six decades of advocacy for gender and pay equity in sports and urging students to carry the work forward.

The award, presented by the Center for Public Leadership and the Institute of Politics, honors leaders who have “sparked social change and inspired others to do the same,” CPL Director Anthony R. Foxx said. Past recipients include Jacinda Ardern, Gloria Steinem, and Al Gore ’69.

Foxx praised King for her willingness to risk her career to drive systemic change.

“You set out to change things. You put your career on the line. You brought others along with you,” he said in his opening remarks.

King, who won 39 Grand Slams in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles, sat for a conversation moderated by HKS Senior Lecturer Hannah R. Bowles.

She traced her activism to an “epiphany” she had at 12 years old at the Los Angeles Tennis Club.

“Everybody wore white clothes, played with white balls, and everybody who played was white,” King said.

“I thought, if I could become number one, I could help change the world,” she added.

In 1968, King won Wimbledon the first year the tournament offered prize money, earning roughly 37.5 percent of what the men’s champion earned.

“I think we’re gonna have another battle here,” she recalled thinking as she left Centre Court.

Two years later, King and eight players signed symbolic $1 contracts with publisher Gladys Heldman in Houston to protest prize disparities at the Pacific Southwest Open, where the men’s champion earned $12,500 compared to $1,500 for the women’s champion.

“That was the birth of women’s professional tennis the way you know it today,” King said of the group, later known as the Original 9.

In 1973, just four days before Wimbledon, King helped organize top players on the tour into what became the Women’s Tennis Association. Later that year, Bristol Meyers agreed to cover the gap in prize money at the U.S. Open, making it the first Grand Slam to award equal pay.

“When I play him, this is about changing the hearts and minds of people,” she said. “Title Nine was passed. It’s June 23, ’72. I’m playing Bobby Riggs September 20, ’73. And I know how important this is psychologically.”

After the match, she said, women approached her saying the win gave them confidence to ask for raises.

“I said, ‘More importantly, did you get it?’” King recalled. “And they did.”

King also described advising former U.S. women’s national soccer team captain Julie M. Foudy in the 1990s on the fight for equal pay in soccer.

“Are you willing to give up something to get something?” King recalled asking Foudy. “Where do you think you have any leverage at all?”

King credited Foudy’s leadership and players from the 1990s teams with helping lead to the U.S. Women’s National Team’s $24 million equal-pay settlement in 2022.

More recently, King and her wife, Ilana Kloss, have helped launch the Professional Women’s Hockey League. After U.S. women’s national ice hockey team captain Kendall Coyne Schofield sought her advice, King said she posed a familiar question to players.

“Are you guys, the top players, willing to stick together through thick and thin?” she remembered asking them.

King added that she has pushed the league’s largely white rosters to recruit more women of color, echoing similar efforts she led within the WTA decades earlier.

Asked about the WTA’s partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — which has drawn criticism from players over the country’s record on women’s rights — King said she was conflicted but believed engagement drove political change.

“I don’t think things change without engagement,” she said.

King closed the forum by invoking civil rights leader Coretta Scott King.

“Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and you win it in every generation,” she said.

“It’s your turn,” King added. “Make it work.”