“Shocking!” says the Women’s Sports Foundation.
They are referring to the latest Gender in Televised Sports report, which appears every five years from the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California.
They are charging that television doesn’t pay enough attention to female athletes in professional soccer, basketball, hockey, and other sports. There’s a reason for this, says American Enterprise scholar Christina Hoff Sommers: audiences for women’s sports simply aren’t as large as those for male sports.
For example, the NBA gets about 92.3 percent of the basketball audience, while the WNBA gets about 7.7 percent. Added to that, the NBA provides generous financial support for the WNBA. The feminist advocates of what in effect amounts to a quota system for women’s athletics on campus have been extremely successful. But Hoff Sommers says they may have met their match with this latest effort:
These activists are accustomed to challenging juicy institutional targets-such as timid university administrators and government bureaucrats. But in taking on TV sports coverage, they are challenging the market itself-the enthusiastic preferences of vast numbers of Americans in a central pursuit of their daily lives. It is a game the sports feminists will lose.