UPDATE (April 7, 2024, 5:11 p.m. ET): The undefeated South Carolina women's squad held off Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes to win the Women's March Madness championship on Sunday, 87-75.
2024 is shaping up to be a milestone year for women’s sports, both in terms of investment and engagement. Turns out, when you put effort and dollars into the infrastructure of the women’s game, people watch.
This year’s Women’s March Madness has been showcased on prime-time TV, while more and more outlets are maintaining regular and knowledgeable coverage of these athletes. The result has been gangbusters ratings — 14.2 million people tuned in to watch Friday’s Final Four matchup between Iowa and UConn — and, accordingly, headlines about the women’s tournament have at times outpaced the men’s. Today’s championship between Caitlin Clark-led Iowa and the undefeated South Carolina squad will be a game for the ages. As The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch put it, “Welcome to the motherf------ new world.”
Turns out, when you put effort and dollars into the infrastructure of the women’s game, people watch.
As viewership has continued to rise over the past few years, so too has betting on women’s sports. According to Maria Marino, host at The Action Network, FanDuel reports that LSU-Iowa was the top betting event on Monday, boasting a 28% increase in wagers over last year’s national championship game. Betting in the WNBA, which has a partnership with FanDuel, is similarly exploding. And this staggering growth is happening globally across women’s sports: Last year, a study published by the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) found that betting on soccer has grown by 20% annually since 2020, while tennis, basketball and cricket saw more than 10% annual growth from 2017 to 2022.
Sports betting clearly benefits women’s sports in many ways. It’s yet another metric to further prove their commercial viability, and points to the revenue they can generate. Money was always going to be the primary pathway to equality.
Women’s sports thus offer the purest distillation of the current landscape of sports betting, as well as its dilemmas. That is, if we can have an honest conversation about them. Part of achieving equality with men’s sports is being scrutinized fairly and to the same degree, whether we’re talking about trash-talking, problematic coaching behavior, or, now, the realities of betting.
Obviously more people watching translates to more people betting, but multiple studies have shown that betting itself can also drive higher viewership and fan engagement, for men’s and women’s sports alike. The NFL has long enjoyed an engagement boost from fans playing fantasy football, for example. Still, Marino is quick to note that she believes the betting is following the viewership, and not the other way around.
“When you become interested enough in something and you want to consume it and you feel you know enough about it, that’s when most casual bettors look to bet on a sport,” she told me. “So the increase in participation as far as betting on women’s basketball, it’s just another sign of the exploding interest in that sport and its popularity.”
To be sure, betting represents a new frontier in investment in women’s sports. “We talk about investment in terms of diversifying programming and marketing opportunities and advertisers. Sports betting brings in a whole new group of advertisers and stuff from the marketing side,” said Khristina Williams, a women’s basketball reporter and founder of Girls Talk Sports TV.
But that new frontier has quite a few potential pitfalls. In the past few years, as more states have legalized sports betting, more betting scandals have (unsurprisingly) come to light. Just in the last few weeks, the controversy around Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter and the NBA’s investigation into Jontay Porter prop bets have spurred a bevy of articles on the reckoning facing American sports when it comes to betting. Even those of us who still support legalization worry about the growing public health crisis of gambling addiction, particularly among younger bettors, challenges to the integrity of games, and increased harassment of athletes.
Women’s sports are not immune to those same issues. The IBIA report detailed several instances of match-fixing in women’s sports dating back more than a decade, stressing the need for leagues and governing bodies to get ahead of corruption by increasing monitoring and regulatory efforts and striving for pay equity. “Stakeholders should actively challenge the misconception that women’s sports are less susceptible to match-fixing,” the report states, adding that there could be a correlation between lower wages and an increased vulnerability to bribes.
“We should be having the same conversations for concerns and issues — and positives — that we’re having for men’s sports,” said Nicole Auerbach, a senior writer at The Athletic and a host for SiriusXM.
There’s just too much money at stake, added Deitsch. “I’m hoping it doesn’t happen, but I think you would be naive if somehow you think that women’s sports would be immune to such a scandal.”
Women’s sports and women athletes are often infantilized to devalue the quality, marketability and revenue potential of their game. As investment increases, that same infantilization could be twisted to ignore potential issues. Women can be bad actors, too, and are not inherently impervious to financial pressures and moral failings.
Women’s sports and women athletes are often infantilized to devalue the quality, marketability and revenue potential of their game.
Importantly, the infrastructure surrounding betting on women’s sports continues to lag behind men’s sports. As both Auerbach and Williams told me, betting lines are still widely unavailable and have been at times inaccurate, and even when you do find an app to bet on women, there are far fewer parlay and prop bet options. This mirrors the overall lack of data and stats available for women’s sports, a long-standing complaint among women athletes and the people who cover them.
“I actually think that betting in women’s sports is pretty inequitable,” Katie Barnes, features writer at ESPN, said. “And so even as there have been surges in betting on women’s games, in particular college basketball and the WNBA, there are significantly less ways to bet on those games, which can be a good or bad thing.”
The bad extends to fan behavior. Recently, we’ve seen an uptick in fans who’ve failed to hit prop bets abusing players. The NCAA is particularly concerned about online harassment against its athletes, with association President Charlie Baker calling for a ban on prop bets outright. Of the 38 states where sports betting is legal, four have already outlawed prop bets on college games.
The concern over betting-related harassment should be particularly acute for women athletes, given the prevalence of both gendered and racial abuse on social media. After LSU lost to Iowa on Monday, Angel Reese spoke out about the abuse she’s faced since LSU won the national championship last year. Iowa guard Gabbie Marshall said she’s deleted social media because of “hate comments” from fans angry over the controversial offensive foul she drew that effectively ended UConn’s season in Friday’s Final Four. It’s not a stretch to think at least some of the vitriol is from bettors who feel they suffered a bad beat because of that one play. (The officiating in women’s college hoops has been under fire all season for inconsistency and lack of transparency.)
Women’s sports are here to stay, and they are going to make a whole lot of people a whole lot of money. But with that money and popularity must come regulations, guidelines and equitable scrutiny. We owe it to fans, investors and athletes to get this right, and to learn from the mistakes the men have already made.
If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call the National Council on Problem Gambling for help at 1-800-522-4700, or go online at ncpgambling.org/chat.