Is this the start of a brand new era in women's sports?

Although Iowa's Caitlin Clark's college profession led to disappointing defeat, the purpose guard's record-breaking season helped generate significant interest on this yr's NCAA women's college basketball tournament.

The Women's Final Four achieved higher rankings on television as the boys's Final Four. Then the ladies's basketball championship game between South Carolina and Iowa wasn't identical to that attract more viewers (18.9 million) than the boys's championship game the next night (14.8 million); It also had more viewers than any World Series game since Game 7 of the 2019 World Series and any NBA Finals game since Game 5 of the 2017 NBA Finals.

Is this one other transient moment of happiness for girls's sports? Or will this shining moment extend far into the long run?

Since the passage of Title IX in 1972, women's sports occasionally experienced big rankings and enormous crowds. In 1983, Almost 12 million viewers tuned in just like the University of Southern California, led by Star Forward Cheryl Millerdefeated LSU within the basketball championship game. And greater than 90,000 fans competed within the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup final in Pasadena, California.

The media briefly focused on these events before returning to day-to-day business and paying close attention to men's sports.

But this moment feels different. Lots of fans, journalists and scientists wonder if that is the beginning of a brand new era for girls's sport, with more coverage, more viewers, increased interest and greater investment in the long run.

The long eclipse of girls's sports

I even have studied for over 30 years the intersections of gender, sport, media and culture.

Since 1989, my colleagues and I even have tracked the amount and quality of coverage of men's and ladies's sports on television news and highlight shows. We collect a brand new batch of knowledge every five years. We are currently within the technique of collecting data for the eighth time, the outcomes of which can be published in 2025. (In 2019, we expanded our evaluation to incorporate online and social media content.)

In our samples, we consistently found that ladies's sports generally accounted for between 3% and 5% of coverage on television news and sports highlight shows, measured in minutes and variety of stories. There have been some spikes over time, driven by high-profile international sporting events equivalent to the 1999 Women's World Cup and the Olympics. The newsletters and social media accounts of the identical networks in our sample also reflect the shortage of television coverage, with roughly 4% to five% of content focused on women's sports.

Our findings usually are not unique. Hundreds of studies Research into routine sports coverage has also found that media coverage of girls's sports rarely accounts for greater than 10% of total sports coverage. This is a recurring pattern across all media platforms – print, TV, radio, social – within the English-speaking world.

Skip the gatekeepers

But while research on traditional media – television, newspapers, magazines – was relevant on the time of those studies, it doesn’t fully capture the explosion of other types of sports consumption over the past decade.

Fans can watch highlights on X, formerly often known as Twitter, and short-form video apps. Podcasts like “Listen to their sports“”The core of it“”Tea with A & Phee” And “Attacking third party“Speaks on to women’s sports fans. Streaming platforms like Fubo TV and Women's Sports Zone on Roku offer a spread of live women's basketball and soccer games, helping to construct and maintain a fan base. And area of interest media that give attention to women's sports, for instance Women's sports onlyoffer quite a lot of content and perspectives.

Female athletes and ladies's teams and leagues now not need to depend on newspapers, magazines and tv networks to achieve their fans. You can easily engage with them directly on social media and produce and distribute content that bypasses traditional media gatekeepers.

Using feminism

A couple of many years ago, the common wisdom was that “sex sells sports.” Media executives focused on the sex appeal of female athletes to draw male fans and viewers. It was assumed that ladies simply weren't fascinated by sports.

But my colleague Dunja Antunovic and I observed a very important shift in sports media starting within the mid-2010s: the mobilization of feminism and equality principles to advertise and sell women's sports.

A chapter in our latest book states: “In the Service of Equality: Feminism, Media and Women's Sports“We give attention to how women's sports leagues and teams, and their corporate sponsors, have used the pictures, language and slogans of feminist and social justice movements to sell merchandise and tickets.

The WNBA has long been committed to racial and social justiceBe it by promoting the #BlackLivesMatter movement or mobilizing voters or advocating for reproductive justice.

During the 2018 season, the WNBA “Take a seat, take a standThe campaign highlighted that ticket proceeds would go to organizations supporting women. The campaign video mixed scenes from WNBA games with scenes from the 2017 Women's March on Washington.

Budweiser's “We Won't Stop Watching” and “It's Worth Watching” campaigns throughout the 2019 Women's World Cup and National Women's Soccer League season directly addressed the shortage of media attention for girls's sports.

In December 2023, University of South Carolina coach Dawn Staley made T-shirts with the slogan “Everyone watches women's sports“ – a reversal of the dismissive excuse used to justify the shortage of coverage of girls’s sports. The shirts were produced by media and retail company Togethxr, whose founders include current and former athletes Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Sue Bird and Simone Manuel.

Be the change they need to see

While corporations and leagues deserve credit for highlighting the worth of girls's sports, it is usually essential to acknowledge how female athletes themselves have driven change.

Caitlin Clark's quest for the NCAA scoring record became must-see television for thousands and thousands of fans. Stunning play from LSU's Angel Reese, UConn's Paige Bueckers, Southern California's Juju Watkins and South Carolina's Kamilla Cardosa – all now household names – also contributed to the tournament's record rankings.

Activism by female athletes has also helped make women's sports more visible over time.

In March 2019, the U.S. national team sued the U.S. Soccer Federation for gender discrimination. In 2022 The two sides reached an agreement on a multi-million dollar severance package and the promise to equalize pay between the boys's and ladies's national teams.

In 2021, Oregon's Sedona Prince posted a viral video the differences in weight rooms within the 2021 NCAA Tournament for men and women. The clip caught national media attention and prompted the NCAA to conduct a gender equity review.

However, gender differences still exist.

Just two years ago, ESPN began broadcasting your complete NCAA women's basketball tournament. Last yr was the primary yr for the reason that Nineteen Eighties that the ladies's tournament was broadcast on network television. The NCAA negotiated a television rights deal that permits the boys's tournament to have its own contract. while the ladies's tournament is combined with other NCAA championship games.

The gender equity review conducted within the wake of Prince's viral post estimated the worth of the ladies's tournament at between $81 million and $112 million. The NCAA had previously set the number at $6 to $7 million. The latest contract estimates the worth at $65 million – an improvement but still well below the independent audit's estimates.

I don't know if this yr's tournament games are a harbinger of a brand new era or in the event that they are simply one other example of this the unevenness of social change in women's sports.

But I find hope in the feminine athletes standing up for equality, in the variety of media platforms correcting long-standing patterns of unequal media coverage, and within the voices of journalists and fans committed to telling stories about women's sports.