Despite Disparities, the Women Have Got Next

This week, three of the best known women’s college basketball coaches in the history of the game, made unprecedented public statements about inequitable treatment involving the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament. Culture in Sports’ own Jeremy Piasecki reported on this last week. https://cultureinsports.com/it-only-becomes-equal-ish-when-it-gets-too-loud/

South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, Stanford’s Tara Vanderveer, who just happens to have more than 1100 wins, and Notre Dame’s former head coach Muffet McGraw, all issued statements that ranged from angry to sad to let down about the unequal treatment the Women’s Championship Tournament, and its competitors, receive from the people who put it on. Staley, Vanderveer, and McGraw all have national championship titles to their credit and five total between the group. But what they got for their anger and frustration- they got trolls in the twitterverse who took it upon themselves to explain to these three extraordinarily accomplished coaches why they are mistaken, or misguided, or just plain wrong.

We know social media permits and perhaps even encourages unaccomplished cowards to opine with impunity. In the right light it’s possible we all can fit that description. But here’s the rub, while some of among us are “mansplaining” to Staley, Vanderveer, and McGraw that interest, viewership, and athleticism, generate greater interest in the men’s game, televised sports are about advertisers and audience as much as just eyes and under this analysis, the women clearly “have got next.”

It is a matter of simple demographics, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament took off in the late 1960s with the children of the Baby Boom reaching college age. In 1966, the number of students enrolled in American colleges and universities crossed six million for the first time. It was the expansion of opportunities to attend college that took college basketball from a niche sport to national phenomenon. Sure, it didn’t hurt that Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Bill Walton and John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty made compelling viewing through the late Sixties to the early Seventies. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollment-and-projections-in-public-and-private-institutions/

By the time Larry Bird and Magic Johnson met in the 1979 NCAA Championship Game, considered by many as the one that cemented college basketball’s hold on public interest, and ushered in the era of big media deals, the number of students in colleges had passed 12 million. That 12 million was still predominantly male but even this gap was closing. In 1982, the first year the NCAA offered a championship in women’s basketball, the number people in college had now surpassed 13.5 million. That number now sits around 20 million. Not all of these college students are traditional-aged and that percentage and overall number has dipped a bit as annual births dropped off from Millennial Generation peaks around 2011. But the sizeable majority of these college students- and future college graduates- and potential target consumers of college sports- are women.

According to Pew Research, 50 years ago men made up 58% of all college students, now women make up 56% of all college enrollees. College sports have ridden an incredible wave of positive personal and societal outcomes that run adjacent to college attendance: increased income; better mental health; greater longevity; and social stability. And it is now women who are reaping those benefits in greater numbers than men. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/the-degrees-of-separation-between-the-genders-in-college-keeps-growing/2019/10/25/8b2e5094-f2ab-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html

It does not necessarily track that women automatically become fans of women’s sports. Most research indicates that women consume sports in much the same manner men do, except that women do it primarily socially and not in the life or death or tribal way their male counterparts do. For my law school classmate who posted on Facebook today that she is leading her NCAA bracket, it is a fun diversion and not determinative of her self-worth.

But as women move into increasingly larger and more critical roles in the workforce and command larger salaries, it is precisely the buying power and eyes of these college graduate women that advertisers are trying to reach through sports content. The NFL thrives off the sheer size of its audience but that audience is already somewhat endangered by its age and comparatively average income levels. All the rest of our American sports are chasing younger and higher income viewers and fans, and that means the most desired eyes are increasingly female.

Right now, these eyes remain on their alma maters’ men’s teams, but the failure of college sports leaders to recognize essential elements of basic equality and fairness between men’s and women’s sports risks these newer and higher income female fans in the long run. Which is ironic, because history show us that women’s tennis began to truly thrive once it opened its biggest events and women achieved equal prize money. It is these fans to whom Staley, Vanderveer, and McGraw are speaking and they know the increasing economic power of their audience will be decisive.