A gender equity review of the NCAA has made a shocking discovery: The NCAA spends more money on revenue-generating sports.
This was the grand conclusion of an external review of the NCAA conducted by law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP. The most notable part of this review is that the NCAA does not actually treat men’s and women’s sports differently most of the time. According to the review, “For the vast majority of NCAA sports, the result is that the men’s and women’s championships of like sports are resourced equitably (albeit perhaps minimally).”
The problem, though, comes “for sports in which one championship is viewed as producing significantly more revenue than its gender counterpart.” According to the report, this covers baseball (compared to softball), basketball, ice hockey, lacrosse, and wrestling. In these sports, the report determined that “stark differences in spending and staffing emerge, leading to inequitable student-athlete experiences in those championships.”
This isn’t exactly a surprise. Revenue-generating sports are what keep all of the smaller college sports afloat. And the differences between the sports are sizable. Using data from Business Insider in 2017, men’s basketball ($8.2 million) dwarfs every sport but football in average revenue, including women’s basketball ($1.8 million). The gap exists between baseball ($1.4 million) and softball (under $700,000), men’s ice hockey ($2.8 million) and women’s ice hockey ($960,000), and men’s lacrosse ($1 million) and women’s lacrosse ($709,000).
It’s evident why when you look at the viewership numbers. In a down year in 2021, the men’s basketball championship game pulled 16.9 million viewers. The women’s championship peaked at 5.9 million, its most-watched contest since 2014. More people watched the women’s College World Series than the men’s (average of 1.2 million to just 755,000), but the difference in how ESPN broadcast both series this year makes it difficult to properly compare.
None of this is to say that women’s sports are somehow worse than men’s or even that they cannot have the same success in some circumstances, as ESPN just showed women’s softball could. But the idea that there is a gender equity problem with the NCAA ensuring that it is properly investing in its revenue-generating sports, which keeps other sports programs alive, is absurd.
Men’s sports oftentimes bring in more revenue and larger audiences than women’s sports at the highest levels. That the NCAA spends more for those revenue-generating sports, which allows it to promote several other smaller sports for both men and women, is not a gender equity problem. It is a reality of how revenue works, and it works to the benefit of women in college sports more often than not.
