Though the college career of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark ended with a disappointing loss, the point guard’s record-breaking season helped fuel widespread interest in this year’s NCAA women’s college basketball tournament.

The women’s Final Four garnered higher television ratings than the men’s Final Four. Then the women’s basketball championship game between South Carolina and Iowa didn’t just draw in more viewers (18.9 million) than the men’s championship game the following night (14.8 million); it also had more viewers than every World Series game since Game 7 of the 2019 World Series and every NBA Finals game since Game 5 of the 2017 NBA Finals.

Does this represent another brief moment in the sun for women’s sports? Or will this shining moment extend far into the future?

Since Title IX’s passage in 1972, women’s sports have occasionally experienced big ratings and massive crowds. In 1983, nearly 12 million viewers tuned in as the University of Southern California, led by star forward Cheryl Miller, bested LSU in the basketball championship game. And more than 90,000 fans attended the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup final in Pasadena, California.

The media briefly focused on these events, before returning to business as usual: giving men’s sports outsized attention.

But this moment feels different. Many fans, journalists and scholars are wondering if this is the dawn of a new era of women’s sports, with more coverage, increased viewership, heightened interest and bigger investments continuing in the future.

The long eclipse of women’s sports

I’ve spent over 30 years studying the intersections of gender, sports, media and culture.

Since 1989, my colleagues and I have been tracking the quantity and quality of coverage of men’s and women’s sports on televised news and highlight shows. Every five years, we collect a new batch of data. We’re in the middle of collecting data for the eighth time, the results of which will be published in 2025. (In 2019, we added online and social media content to our analysis.)

In our samples, we’ve consistently found that women’s sports on televised news and sports highlight shows generally comprise between 3% and 5% of the coverage, measured in minutes and number of stories. Over the years, there have been a few spikes driven by high-profile international sporting events, such as the 1999 Women’s World Cup and the Olympics. The newsletters and social media accounts of the same networks in our sample also mirror the dearth of television coverage, with about 4% to 5% of the content focused on women’s sports.

Our findings are not unique. Hundreds of studies on the routine coverage of sports have similarly found that media coverage of women’s sports rarely exceeds 10% of total sports coverage. This is a recurring pattern across media platforms – print, TV, radio, social – in English-speaking countries.

Leapfrogging the gatekeepers

Yet while research on traditional media – television, newspapers, magazines – was relevant at the time of these studies, it does not fully capture the explosion of other ways to consume sports over the past decade.

Fans can watch highlights on X, formerly known as Twitter, and short-form video apps. Podcasts like “Hear Her Sports,” “The Gist of It,” “Tea with A & Phee” and “Attacking Third” directly appeal to women’s sports fans. Streaming platforms such as Fubo TV and Women’s Sports Zone on Roku offer a range of live women’s basketball and soccer games, which helps build and sustain a fan base. And niche media outlets centered on women’s sports, like Just Women’s Sports, offer a diversity of content and perspectives.

Women athletes, along with women’s teams and leagues, no longer need to rely on newspapers, magazines and TV networks to reach fans. They can simply directly engage with them on social media, producing and pushing content that bypasses traditional media gatekeepers.

Leveraging feminism

A few decades ago, conventional wisdom held that “sex sells sports.” Media executives focused on the sex appeal of female athletes to attract male fans and viewers. The thinking went that women simply weren’t interested in sports.

But my colleague Dunja Antunovic and I observed an important shift in sports media starting in the mid-2010s: the mobilization of feminism and principles of equality to promote and sell women’s sports.

In one chapter of our latest book, “Serving Equality: Feminism, Media, and Women’s Sports,” we focus on how women’s sports leagues and teams, as well as their corporate sponsors, have used the imagery, language and slogans of feminism and social justice movements to sell merchandise and tickets.

The WNBA has a long-standing commitment to racial and social justice, whether it’s through promoting the #BlackLivesMatter movement, mobilizing voters or advocating for reproductive justice.