If you asked 50 female executives in corporate America what led to their success in business, you’re likely to get a wide variety of answers.

But one theme will emerge more prominently than most. Most women who now occupy a top C-suite position—and many of their high-performing female peers up and down the org chart—played and even excelled at sports throughout their teenage years, including at the collegiate level.

It’s easy to see why. The same confident leadership and decision-making skills that make for a successful career are often forged in the fires of high-competition athletics. That’s proven out time and again in multiple studies that date back to the late 1990s, including research from Ernst & Young and ESPN showing that 94 percent of women executives played competitive sports.

Not surprisingly, most of these women say their experience on the playing field accelerated their careers. And no doubt, the same can be said of any woman who carries the life lessons she gained through competition into education, medicine, law, or homemaking.

That’s one reason that two recently argued cases at the U.S. Supreme Court deserve our attention. In Little v. Hecox and State of West........

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