Women’s Sports Are Thriving. Will Equality Follow?
Audiences for women’s sports are surging and investment is rising. But a mismatch between viewership and advertising is curbing how far the boom can go.
When Jane McManus, a veteran sports writer and journalist, first started covering high school sports back in 1997, women’s sports were considered niche: a sideshow to the more important men’s games.
Over the last five years, however — and especially since the Covid-19 pandemic — she’s witnessed an explosion in the popularity of women’s soccer, basketball, rugby and cricket. Attendance records have been broken. Female athletes have become household names. This year marked the third consecutive Winter Games at which U.S. women won more gold medals — and more medals overall — than U.S. men.
"The progress in the last few years is genuinely breathtaking,” McManus says. “But at the same time, it was completely overdue."
A report published earlier this year by Bank of America Institute quantifies this surge. According to the data in it, the number of people watching women’s sports in the U.S. has almost tripled since 2020, driven especially by younger, affluent and digitally native consumers who are flocking to live events, spending money on merchandise and watching sports online.
Indeed, momentum is such that the authors of the report predict revenue from women’s sports in the U.S. alone to rise by at least 250% to $2.5 billion by the year 2030.
The big picture, however, is a bit more complicated.
“The sports industry is a workplace,” says McManus, “and the same unseen forces that keep women back in corporate settings impact players in women's sports.” And that's exactly why The Persistent sat down with McManus — who is the author of “The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women's Sports,” published last year — to talk about the progress, the problems and what it would take for true equity to emerge in the world of professional sports.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
The number of people watching women’s sports in the U.S. has nearly tripled since 2020. What’s driving that?
The big-picture driver is community. Women’s sports are finding a real lane in live events and community-building. I’ve been to a number of events over the past year at which attendance records have been broken. We’re seeing paradigm-busting ticket sales.
It feels different to be at a women’s sporting event today than it has in the past. It’s an incredibly inclusive, accepting environment, and it’s really fun. You’ll see men chanting “Happy International Women’s Day” at a game.
I love men’s sports — I love going to games — but I think a lot of people who go to women’s games feel that the people they encounter there are their people. That’s validating, joyful and celebratory.
When you experience that, it creates a different kind of buy-in. It’s almost a form of active rebellion or self-assertion, and that’s very powerful.
How did the Covid-19 pandemic play into this?
There was one particular moment during the pandemic that really changed the tenor of support for women’s sports.
It was in March 2021, during the NCAA basketball tournament. Both the men’s and women’s tournaments were played in bubbles. A player from Oregon, Sedona Prince, posted a TikTok video that went viral. In it, she showed the weight room that was available to women — it was a tiny setup with just a few hand weights. She then showed the men’s weight room, which was enormous, like a converted ballroom. She was asking: How are we still being told to accept this?
That moment put a spotlight on inequity. These are elite athletes who need proper training facilities, especially during the biggest tournament of their careers. It showed both a misunderstanding of women’s sports and the fact that resources existed but weren’t being allocated equally.
That video led to an independent report commissioned by the NCAA, which found significant inequities in how the men’s and women’s tournaments were marketed and monetized.
[Just two years earlier] in 2019, the U.S. women’s national team won the World Cup, with chants from the audience of “equal pay.” That’s when the conversation [began to] shift from something academic to a rallying cry taken up by fans, players, everyone.
People began to feel that if women’s sports were going to succeed, they needed to show up — with their attention, their attendance and their spending. That fundamentally reorganized investment and support around women’s sports.
How else are women’s sports changing?
Historically, rules were shaped by outdated ideas about women’s physical limitations. Those ideas, like the myth of frailty, actually influenced how sports were structured.
That’s changing. Women’s sports are becoming more physical and competitive, which also changes perception, and [that] is drawing bigger crowds. The idea that women don’t want contact or competition is really going away.
So what are the biggest barriers still holding back women’s sports?
One issue is that the dominant broadcast advertising model doesn’t align well with the [reality of] audience demographics. For men’s sports, audiences might be 70% male, which makes it easy to sell traditionally male-targeted products. Audiences for women’s sports, by contrast, are more balanced — closer to 55 - 45 — which makes it harder to target ads in the same way.
There aren’t enough men to sustain traditional male-targeted advertising but there also aren’t enough women for heavily-gendered female advertising. That mismatch creates a major constraint.
Because of that [mismatch], broadcasters are more cautious. Advertising sales are often commission-based, so there’s less incentive to experiment with new audience profiles. The focus becomes protecting existing audiences rather than expanding into new ones.
And how does that translate into pay for athletes?
Athlete pay is typically determined through collective bargaining agreements, where a percentage of league revenue goes to player salaries.
The biggest source of that revenue is broadcast rights. So if women’s sports generate less from broadcast deals, either because of lower visibility or ad revenue, then salaries will also be lower.
How important has social media been in all of this?
It’s been a game changer.
Before social media, it was easy to say, “Nobody watches women’s sports.” But social media created visible, measurable audiences — follower counts, engagement, reach.
Suddenly, you could point to millions of people following athletes. That made it impossible to deny the audience.
Once that audience became visible, it changed the entire conversation. It created hard data that proved women’s sports were already popular.
Considering all this progress — and these constraints — where do we go from here? Will the gap close?
Women can only go as far in sports as they can in society. Sports are a workplace, and the same structural issues that affect women in other workplaces affect women in sports, too.
There are also cultural debates, some of which echo older ideas about women’s “frailty.” That can hold progress back.
Ultimately, the future depends on the community. Women’s sports have become a space of solidarity and shared values. That’s what gives them power, not just culturally, but politically.
In open, inclusive societies, women’s sports will thrive. In more restrictive environments, they may struggle. In many ways, the future of women’s sports is tied to the broader future of gender equality.
Grace L. Williams
Tanya Mozias
Emma Haslett
