The year is 2026. Viewing numbers for women’s sport are higher than ever before. Women’s gymnastics was one of the most watched sports of the 2024 Olympic Games. The Women’s Euro final was the most watched TV moment in the UK across all broadcasters in 2025. This year, the WNBA has recorded its best viewership since 2000. The statistics say it all: people enjoy watching female athletes compete, but despite their continued success, there is still a marked deficit in the coverage and promotion of women’s sport.
You can turn on the TV and immediately know where to watch the Premier League, but it takes extra digging to find the Women’s Super League. In this way, men’s sport is posed as the default, while women’s sport becomes an afterthought. Athletes such as Serena Williams, Nicola Adams, and Susie Wolff have been hailed as trailblazers, but where is that trail exactly, and why are we still not at a level of coverage equal to men’s sport?
The simple answer is that sport is still as male-dominated as ever. It took until the 2012 London Olympic Games for women to be able to compete in every event on the programme, and only at Paris 2024 were quota places distributed equally between the sexes for the first time in history. Social media has lately been inundated with videos of men comfortably claiming they could easily beat a professional female sprinter or weightlifter – only to be proven wrong moments later of course – but it is this brazen attitude and the misogynistic belief that a man’s athletic ability is inherently superior to a woman’s that is part of the problem. Intrinsic value is handed to men’s sport, as if it is more ‘worthy’ of spectatorship. Women’s sport exists in a society rooted deeply in sexism, and until strides are made for women on a global scale, our sport will continue to be sidelined.
Misogyny has only fed the very financial inequalities holding women’s sport back; the sporting industry thrives off the backs of sponsors and investors, and if they do not believe that something will make them a profit, then they have little motivation to fund it. Despite increased traction, women’s sport is still deemed a risky investment, especially at lower levels. It is this same reasoning that attempts to justify why sportswomen are paid significantly less than their male counterparts.
Athletes are treated as assets. If insufficient appeal is generated, then that ‘risk’ will not be taken, hence the importance of maintaining viewership. This however can only be achieved through regular broadcasting, which aforementioned biases continue to hinder. Standalone events, such as the FIFA Women’s World Cup, are in the meantime used to placate the demand for more attention on women in sports, before it is all swept under the rug again during the regular season. This limited exposure is not the progressive move that the media believes it is.
As the old adage goes, “whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.” In the world of sport this has never been more true. Realistically, it will still take some time before any change is set in stone, but until then continued engagement with women’s sport should help to prove to promoters and investors that the future of competitive sport does not lie solely in the hands of male athletes.
Photo by Selma DA SILVA on Unsplash under the Unsplash license.
