WNBATwitter celebrates glass ceilings shattered

In the three weeks leading up the All-Star Game, you may have noticed the WNBA tweeting in a bunch of different languages with the hashtag #MoreThanIncredible. They were asking fans for examples of the league shattering glass ceilings. Fans had no idea that a selection of their tweets would be read in recorded videos by legendary WNBA players and media members and then tweeted back out to the world.

The tweets were written out on paper and that paper was enclosed inside sugar glass that the readers symbolically shattered in a “demolition room” before reading. The tweets that were chosen were in a variety of languages!

Here’s Sue Bird, Sylvia Fowles, Monica McNutt, A’ja Wilson, LaChina Robinson and Chicago Bears linebacker Roquan Smith thanking their selected fans and reading their tweets:

The WNBA’s original tweet that asked about examples of shattering glass ceilings was tweeted out in English, Japanese, Spanish, French and Portuguese, the five most frequently used languages to tweet about the WNBA. As of July 7, sixty-five percent of responses had been in foreign languages and 36 percent had been in Japanese, which was the most frequently used language — more used than English.

The hashtag #WNBATwitter was used 16 times more frequently in 2021 than it was in 2020. Also, in 2021, 676K people were first-time WNBA tweeters and 33 million people were first-time readers of a WNBA-related tweet. That year, people who were WNBA tweeters were 10 times more likely than the average person to tweet the following hashtags: #EqualPay, #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #StopAsianHate. In 2020, a record 20 percent of WNBA tweets came from countries other the the U.S. and in 2021, the percentage of WNBA tweeters tweeting in foreign languages rose 35 percent.

Dearica v. Arike

Dearica Hamby (Team Wilson) and Arike Ogunbowale (Team Stewart) live-tweeted the 2022 All-Star Game, which they were both participating in!

Here are some highlights from that: