While at Yale, Gilder was on the women's crew team. However, there was no locker room available for the women's crew team, so they had to wait on the bus after practice while the men showered before they could return to campus. In 1976, she was part of a protest in which nineteen members of the Yale women's crew wrote "
TITLE IX" on their bodies and went into athletic director Joni Barnett's office naked, and then rower
Chris Ernst read a statement about the way they were being treated. This protest was noted by newspapers around the world, including
The New York Times. Gilder was first selected for the U.S. Olympic team in 1980, the year that the United States
boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow, Russia. She was a member of the American women's
quadruple sculls team that won the silver medal at the
1984 Summer Olympics in
Los Angeles, California. ==Author and private life ==