Untapped Markets
It was clear going into Sunday afternoon’s game that the NCAA Women’s Final was going to set a viewership record for the sport (the old record having been set 39 whole hours before, all the way back on Friday night’s semifinal, which broke the record set during the previous Monday’s Regional Final), but the ultimate number was still shocking. The average viewership of 18.87 million nearly doubled last year’s Final, which was itself a record-setting viewership number at the time.
The obvious explanation for this was the star power of Caitlin Clark, who played in all four of those record-setting games. And Clark has obviously helped elevate the sport — there’s no denying that. Her pursuit of the all-time scoring record helped draw in new fans, and her style of play, with long threes and full-court passes, is easy for fans to latch onto. When you add her to the other stars and storylines around the game — Angel Reese at LSU, Paige Bueckers at UConn, South Carolina capping off a fourth straight Final Four run with an undefeated season — it’s easy to attribute these viewership records to all the exciting things going on in women’s basketball right now.
But this explanation feels a little half-baked. For one, it’s not as if women’s college basketball has been missing stars before now. Was Diana Taurasi not a star? Candace Parker? Brittney Griner? Breanna Stewart? Sabrina Ionescu? Kelsey Plum broke the scoring record just seven years ago, and was only about nine games short of catching Pete Maravich’s record, but she didn’t break through the way Clark has this year.
The whole thing feels a little self-serving to people (myself very much included!) who have been neglecting women’s basketball for years. It suggests that the game simply wasn’t good enough to be more popular before now. Oh, we were just waiting for the right star to come along before we all started paying attention!
As a socialist and a materialist, I am deeply skeptical of explanations like this. They suggest that history is moved by compelling individual leaders, instead of by the hard, immutable logic of market forces. It seems far more likely to me that the sudden burst of attention onto women’s basketball is the result of simple structural changes that have been made over the last few years.
It was only in 2021 that ESPN started showing complete first- and second-round games of the women’s tournament, as opposed to “whiparound” coverage that showed games only regionally, with sporadic check-ins on other close games around the country. (The change was supposed to go into effect in 2020, before the Tournament was canceled due to Covid-19.) The following year, the NCAA finally let the women use the “March Madness” branding, which had been reserved for men until then. And last year, the championship game was moved to Sunday afternoon, and finally aired on ABC for the first time, as opposed to a cable channel.
Now, obviously there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here. Did ESPN start promoting the women’s tournament more because it got more popular, or did it get more popular because ESPN was promoting it more? It’s probably a little of both, but it’s worth pointing out that the NCAA and ESPN had to be almost bullied into a lot of these changes, adopting them only after outcry and pushback from people within the sport. It certainly doesn’t seem like the people in charge entirely understood the value of the asset they had…
…And there are many people out there ready to tell you that women’s basketball has been neglected by the suits in charge, who are disproportionately rich old white men who might have a blindspot when it comes to the popularity of women’s sports. This kind of analysis is now quite common in certain liberal circles, which are focused on diversifying elite institutions and “elevating marginalized voices” in such a way that traditional views — like the idea that women’s sports can’t outdraw men’s — are no longer accepted without question.
On the other hand, a materialist analysis rejects this idea. Any Marxist would resist the suggestion that the owners of the means of production (ESPN, Disney, and the NCAA, in this case) would let a silly little thing like sexism stand in the way of making money. As Karl Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto:
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”
In other words, capitalist exploitation is supposed to triumph over every other kind of exploitation, including gendered oppression. If women’s basketball could have been making money all this time, then surely it would have.
As much as I generally prefer the socialist analysis to the modern liberal one, I have to say that both these explanations strike me as pretty myopic here. It seems quite obvious to me, even as just a casual fan, that women’s college basketball has been great for a long time, and could have been making a lot of money and drawing high ratings for a long time, were it given the promotion that it is only just now starting to get. At the same time, it’s clear that just adding a few women to the boardrooms at the NCAA and ESPN is not going to solve this problem of gender inequity in college sports.
Perhaps most importantly, though, we ought to resist any notion that market forces are immutable laws of nature. That if a sport isn’t profitable or popular, it’s because people just “don’t want to watch it.” There are obviously market failures out there, and the profit-seeking nature of capital is relentless but not infallible. A better, more equal world is in fact possible…