Rafaela Pimenta is wearing a beige splint over her left wrist. She tore the ligaments in her fingers and thumb playing, ironically enough, football.
“It’s so stupid,” she says, understandably frustrated she cannot do daily tasks such as tying up her hair or typing on her laptop and phone.
But what irks her far more is some people’s reaction, even today, when she tells them she is a football agent. As she sat down to see the doctor about her recent hand injury, he asked what she did for work.
“I’m a football agent,” said Pimenta. The doctor stopped writing. “That’s not possible,” he said.
That triggers her.
“Why?” she replied.
“But you’re a woman?” he said.
“He really said this to me!” Pimenta tells The Athletic. “He didn’t mean it badly (but) he was looking at me as if I had fallen from space.
“I was so angry. I wanted to tell him: ‘Listen, you’re sexist!’ It was clear he thought I could not do this job. The reason it annoys me is because it shouldn’t matter. If it didn’t matter, nobody would ask. It means people still judge your worth by your gender as well. In football, it matters and it shouldn’t.”
Pimenta, who has recently become a non-executive director for Women In Football, an organisation that champions female talent to…
