Women’s sports uncertain after momentum grinds to halt
Around the world, women’s sports had been picking up steam and momentum.
But now that has come to a screeching halt.
There is concern that the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic could severely impact the future and growth women’s sports. As the sports world contracts, leagues and associations with the fewest resources will be hurt the most.
The commissioner of the National Pro Fastpitch softball league likened it to the difference between being adrift on a choppy sea in a yacht or in a canoe.
“Men’s sports are the ones with the yacht,” Cheri Kempf told the Associated Press. “Women’s sports, we’re riding around out there in a canoe.”
The past 12 months have been a landmark period for women’s sports. The Women’s World Cup in France drew more than a billion viewers and provided concrete evidence that the funds European soccer clubs and a growing number of federations had invested in their women’s teams in recent years were paying tangible dividends. There was hope that the growing enthusiasm would continue to spill into the National Women’s Soccer League, as it did last summer after the World Cup.
The WNBA had agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement that would increase salaries. There was a wave of interest in the league, buoyed by the emergence of Oregon’s Sabrina Ionescu as a national star, and the tragic spotlight put on the league by the deaths of Kobe Bryant and his WNBAdreaming daughter, Gigi. And the U.S. women’s basketball team was playing a preOlympic barnstorming schedule of games to enthusiastic crowds.
The Women’s Tennis Association was scheduled to begin awarding recordbreaking prize money. Female athletes from around the world were looking forward to the Summer Olympics when softball would make a return and provide a stage where women, like gymnast Simone Biles, emerge as the biggest stars of the show.
“2019 was such an incredible, historic year in women’s sports history,” said Victoria Jackson, a professor of sports history at Arizona State. “All of this momentum and energy that had been building has been turned off with a switch.”
When sports returns, it almost certainly will be in a reduced form because of a freefalling economy and a more competitive market for advertising dollars and audiences. And that will hurt women.
“Whenever there’s an economic downturn, women’s sports are hurt,” Jackson said.
There is already alarm that the recent strides taken in women’s soccer in South America are being rolled back. A judge’s summary dismissal of the crux of the U.S. women’s soccer team’s landmark gender equity lawsuit landed with a blow May 1, a slap down that seemed to correspond too perfectly with the grim climate.
College sports also almost certainly will be facing a contraction. Women’s collegiate sports receive some protections there, thanks to Title IX, the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination.
“There’s a hierarchy in college athletics,” said Andrew Brandt, a former sports executive and a sports law professor at Villanova Law School. “The bigmoney drivers float a lot of the other sports. Men’s revenue sports are at the top. Women are in the middle. Then the nonrevenue men’s sports kind of pull up the rear. So, women’s sports are not as vulnerable as things like men’s wrestling and men’s gymnastics.”
Former Stanford athletic director Ted Leland, who cochaired a commission on Title IX convened during the George W. Bush presidency, thinks it is unlikely that an economic crisis can be used to unfairly impact women’s collegiate sports.
“One of our findings was that Title IX is one of the most popular civil rights laws ever passed,” Leland said. “There is overwhelming support for it. It’s such a part of our cultural belief system the American public would not let it happen.”
In the professional ranks, only the WNBA has a true safety net; not only the backing of the NBA but the strong support of many of its male counterparts. The other nascent leagues have a tenuous structure, which might make it difficult to ride out these choppy seas.
“Women’s sports are growing in popularity but almost none are as popular as their male counterpart,” said Stanford economics professor Roger Noll, noting that women’s soccer was the exception. “The existing institutions for women’s pro sports are more likely to disappear. But if and when COVID19 is beaten, I expect new institutions to arise to replace them.”
Which sounds an awful lot like starting over.