Nike caused its own downfall by breaking the cardinal rule of capitalism

On Monday, Wall Street makes it official: Nike has lost its blue-chip luster.That’s when the once-dominant athletic-wear behemoth drops out of the S&P 100 — the benchmark index of America’s large-cap companies — for the first time in 18 years.With Nike’s stock down nearly 80% from its 2021 high, it’s no wonder.Revenue peaked two years ago at $51.36 billion, but it’s sunk 10% since.It would be easy and pat to dismiss this debacle as the business world’s latest example of “go woke, go broke.”But the truth is more complicated.Nike was always a men’s brand that sold some stuff to women.You could see it in its hard-driving, hyper-competitive aesthetic: “Just Do It” is the quintessential male locker-room dare.That built an empire with men, but it never fully landed with women — even though we can be competitive and hard-driving too.The brand’s record with women tells the tale.Allyson Felix, the most decorated American track athlete alive, had to fight Nike for maternity protections after the company slashed her sponsorship pay when she got pregnant.Mary Cain, a teen prodigy in Nike’s Oregon Project running club, described a culture that monitored her weight and ignored her injuries.Her Nike coach, she said, abused her to the point that she contemplated suicide.The experience ended her running career.Corporate headquarters fostered a boys’ club so entrenched that in 2018 women at Nike circulated surveys documenting harassment, strip-club outings, keys thrown at female employees and careers that stalled unless you could “play in the sandbox.”Highly regarded senior men were ousted from the company over these revelations, and then-CEO Mark Parker publicly apologized.But he never fully recovered from the scandal; Parker was gone by 2020.So Nike’s “pro-woman” stance has always been marketing, and nothing more.It misses the mark with female consumers every time.For example, Nike was late to yoga as a lifestyle, and late to the ide...