When Jasmin Paris collapsed across that fabled yellow gate marking the finish line of the Barkley Marathons on March 22, the internet exploded. And not just the small corner of X (formerly Twitter) that follows the tweets of enthusiastic Barkley fan Keith Dunn for 60 hours every spring. Major media outlets around the world—The New York Times, BBC, ESPN, CNN—lined up to share her story of becoming the first woman finisher in the race’s 37-year history.

It’s true that even Hollywood couldn’t have scripted a better ending—Paris completed the grueling, cryptic race with just one minute to spare. And it’s true that Barkley almost always punches above its weight when it comes to the hype drawn by this quirky event in the mountains of Tennessee.

Paris, 40, is a soft spoken animal veterinarian and mother of two from Midlothian, Scotland, who over the past several years has eschewed traditional sponsorships in favor of supporting the Green Runners, a climate change advocacy group she helped start. She transcends the rest of the eccentric 20 ultrarunners who have successfully completed all five laps of “the race that eats its young.” And that includes Jared Campbell, who just 30 minutes previously had become the first four-time finisher. In fact, the attention her extraordinary feat received may be the result of a much larger trend—an increased interest in women’s sports.

Proof in Numbers 

Talking about madness in March, this year for the first time ever, more viewers tuned into the ESPN broadcast of the women’s NCAA Division I college basketball title game than the men’s. Far more—18.7 million on average (24 million at its peak) compared to an average of 14.8 million for the men’s game, according to the NCAA. (And it should be noted that viewership of the men’s game was up from last year’s 14.7 million.)

A month later, tennis superstar Serena Williams’s husband and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian put a big bet on women’s track and field when he announced that his venture capital firm Seven Seven Six is investing in a new women’s-only track meet, the 776 Invitational, slated for the end of September.

Sensing this palpable momentum behind women’s sports, Parity, a company aiming to close the gender income and opportunity gap in pro sports by matching women athletes with brands for endorsement deals, set out to find the data depicting this upward trajectory. Partnering with Survey Monkey, Parity conducted a survey of nearly 11,000 women and men in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia, asking questions about their feelings toward women’s sports. The results corroborate what we feel in the zeitgeist: women’s sports have moved from a moment to a movement.

Nearly three quarters (73 percent) of survey respondents say they watch women’s sports at least a few times a year. That’s 8 percent less than the 81 percent who say they watch men’s sports at least a few times a year. It’s still a gap, but one much smaller than many anticipated—including Parity.

With the advances in women’s sports, Parity expected viewership to continue its gradual increase, but data shows the surge happened over the last few years. Over a quarter of respondents (28 percent) said they’re watching more women’s sports now than this time last year. In the U.S., more than half (53 percent) of women’s sports fans said they’ve been watching women’s sports for three years or less. The appeal is universal. According to a 2023 YouGov poll survey taken across 18 international markets, men are more likely to watch women’s sports, with 31 percent of viewership coming from men and 22 percent women.

“It’s not just women tuning into women’s sports. Everybody’s tuning into women’s sports,” Leela Srinivasan, CEO of Parity, told RUN in an exclusive interview in advance of the survey’s launch. “And more men, in fact, are likelier to watch frequently than women.”

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You Have to See it to Believe It

So why the sudden surge in interest? Srinivasan attributes it to the trifecta of increased media attention (live event broadcasts and pre-and post-event coverage), quality of play, and star power. That hunch is backed up by data. The number one reason for watching women’s sports is a desire to support women (41 percent), followed by the quality of play (33 percent) and an interest in following individual athletes (32 percent). Americans and Canadians in particular are most likely to watch women’s sports thanks to individual star power (36 and 34 percent, respectively).

Obviously, the first step in garnering greater interest has been making women’s sports more accessible. The rise of streaming services and the de-consolidation of cable TV has opened the door to more viewing opportunities.

“I am a lifelong watcher of all sports. I grew up watching everything under the sun back in Scotland where I grew up,” Srinivasan says. “And as I was reflecting on it, that meant that when I watched women’s sports, I watched women at the Olympics and I watched women play in Wimbledon. And those were really the only times that women’s sports were on TV when I was growing up.”

Now, women’s sports are widely televised—if still a minority of sports coverage. The infamous statistic that only 4 percent of sports media coverage is of women has gone up to a whopping 15 percent in the past year, according to a 2023 study conducted by Wasserman. But the saturation of the TV market means audiences need to seek the coverage out—and increasingly, they are.

“I do think it starts with media access,” Srinivasan says. “If you can’t access it, then you can’t watch it. But once they tune in, they’re really discovering just how much there is to explore and the quality and the style of play and everything.”

That being said, finding women’s sports on TV can be hard. Half of U.S. women’s sports fans surveyed said they typically find women’s sports by channel surfing.

Over half of respondents (55 percent) said they would watch more women’s sports if they could watch it with others. This widespread desire suggests that Ohanian’s move to purchase the Sports Bra, a women’s sports bar in Portland, Oregon, and the plan to open franchises in additional cities is more than an act of altruism.

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A Different Game

While media access is a necessary condition, it’s insufficient to explain the increased popularity.  Women’s sports provide a unique, entertaining style of play that, it turns out, is not inferior to men’s.

“I think I was also just really excited to see there were answers that related more to the quality of the play, to the skill level,” Srinivasan says. “Depending on the sport you’re playing, watching the women’s version of that sport might be quite different. The classic analog in this country is basketball because women’s pro basketball does look different from men’s pro basketball because physically the game is different, but I can tell you having sat courtside at an NBA game and a WNBA game, it is just as exciting.”

Excitement level, quality of play, and differences in how the sport is played between women and men were all cited in the survey as primary reasons for tuning into women’s sports. During the collegiate basketball season, many ESPN and ABC commentators and retired star athletes—men and women alike—remarked how the women’s game is much more focused on fundamentals and team play than the men’s.

“The players leave it all on the court,” Srinivasan says. “The skill level and strategy in the women’s game is just different. And so I think it was interesting to see that kind of surfacing in some of the feedback that there are so many reasons that fans are leaning into women’s sports.”

Star Power

In addition to a unique style of play, Parity’s survey shows that women’s sports are garnering attention thanks to the stardom of individual athletes. It’s another trend Ohanian seemed to be ahead of when he tapped sprinter superstar Gabby Thomas to put a face to the 776 invitational.

Going back to basketball, if you remotely followed March Madness this spring, this news will not come as a surprise. The record-breaking numbers of fans tuning into the NCAA women’s playoffs is inextricably linked to the Caitlin Clark effect, the resounding interest in the two-time collegiate National Player of the Year from University of Iowa who became the top WNBA draft pick of the Indiana Fever on April 15. Within days, her number 22 jersey became the top-selling ever for any draft pick in any sport (male or female), according to the licensed sportswear retailer Fanatics. (That figure was broken 10 days later after Caleb Williams was chosen first in the NFL Draft by the Chicago Bears.) The WNBA Draft itself amassed a record-breaking average of 2.5 million viewers—up four-fold from 2023, ESPN reported.

“In the U.S. specifically, we see more fans tuning in because they follow an individual and it was a specific athlete that resonates with them,” Srinivasan says. “And so you see a little bit of that star power almost in the U. S. numbers, in particular North America in general.”

Srinivasan attributes this star power largely to social media and the athlete access it provides to fans. In fact, due to the gender wage gap across many sports, female athletes have more incentive to build brands on social media to gain additional sponsorships, Srinivasan says.

“In working with these thousand plus athletes, we’re well aware of how entrepreneurial they have to be in order to kind of stitch together a living across the multiple things that they do,” Srinivasan says. “That requires a lot of them to set up and have a robust social media presence and platforms like Instagram. You see that you see very clearly in this report, the impact of Instagram in terms of where people are tuning into women’s sports and women athletes. It’s a great storytelling platform. It allows the athletes to let the fans inside in some ways and share who they are as people.”

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Parity in Paris and Beyond

Women’s sports fandom may be here to stay, but there’s still a long way to go.

“Fandom has far outpaced growth of infrastructure. And when you look at collective bargaining agreements and the different, different ways in which the rules are set regarding money changing hands, that the infrastructure still needs to catch up,” Srinivasan says. “It will do that, but there will be some frustration along the way. A betting person would have said, ‘Look, the WNBA is going to have to fly charter this year because they can’t possibly have Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese fly coach.’ I mean, that’s ridiculous.”

The starting annual salary for WNBA players this year is $76,535 (for a 40-game regular season schedule)–less than 10 percent of the NBA’s $1.1 million (for an 82-game season), according to Statista. Money needs to catch up to this acceleration in fan interest, Srinivasan says, but the rise of brand partnerships for star athletes—Clark, for example, signed a $28 million, eight-year deal with Nike—has begun to make a meaningful impact.

Even with the rise of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals for college athletes over the past three years, only 9 percent of sports media investment dollars go into women’s sports. And yet, the majority (57 percent) of consumers across the countries surveyed say they trust women athletes believe in the products they promote—that’s 7 percentage points higher than their trust in male athletes. In addition, fans of women’s sports are 2.8 times more likely to purchase a product promoted by a female athlete than by other types of influencers.

Armed with this data, Srinivasan challenges brand leaders and marketing leaders to take a highly educated bet.

“There’s still a great opportunity to experiment. And also, I think ,still benefit from that halo effect of your brand being involved in doing something that, as seen in this, this report, the general population thinks is inherently good,” she says. “They want to see brands invest more. They want to see more women’s sports media coverage. They know that women athletes haven’t had the same opportunities. So brands that come in at this still relatively early stage are going to capitalize on that.”

Srinivasan’s message to brands: Be bolder in women’s sports.

“There’s just a whole world of opportunity out there,” she says. “And hopefully this report opens people’s eyes to just the variety of sports and the mainstream kind of opportunity that women’s sports represents.”

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The upswell in interest around women’s sports, while overdue, comes at the perfect time for the Paris Olympics this summer, which will make history as the first Olympic Games with an equal number of men and women competing on the global stage. Although Rule 40, which severely limits athlete partnerships during and around the Games, immediately impacts how much athletes can capitalize on surging interest this summer, Srinivasan believes for long-term exposure, the timing couldn’t be better.

“They hopefully put on the performance of their lifetime and then have the opportunity to capitalize on that,” she says.

She says that while brands’ marketing budgets generally operate a year out, the uptick in interest in brands wanting to work with the women athletes with the Parity network is already palpable.

“We’re having a lot more serious conversations with brands,” she says. “To me, experimenting with women’s sports is such a no brainer right now. You should still be doing that with your surplus, your rainy day fund as a CMO in 2024 while plotting bigger things in 2025.”

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