Quote:"Follow the money," answers David Carter, executive director of the Sports Business Institute at USC. The multibillion-dollar sports business, Carter points out, is driven largely by the desires and preferences of male fans. They're the primary consumers of sports tickets and merchandise, the main audience for sports radio and sports news, and the target audience for sports advertisers.
Women? "You can legislate [equal funding for sports], but you can't mandate that [women] consume sports the way men do," Carter says. "If there was more interest, I guarantee you there would be more coverage."
To be sure, a growing number of women call themselves sports fans, though far more men do. Of the people who described themselves as "avid" sports fans in a nationwide poll of 2,700 adults this year, 74 percent were men. Among those who identified themselves as "casual" fans, the sexes were more balanced: 47.5 percent of this group were women, according to Burst Media, the research company that conducted the poll.
None of this does much for women's sports, however. Study after study confirms that female sports fans tend to watch what male fans watch, a correlation that suggests TV-sports viewing is a bonding activity for many women. Among men, for example, Sunday-night telecasts of National Football League games on NBC are the top-rated program on TV. Among women, the NBC games rank third (after "Dancing With the Stars" and "Grey's Anatomy").
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/22/AR2010122205128_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010122205514
I think it is a good idea to try for equal participation in sports during the high school years, but is it really fair to subsidize Women's collegiate sports with the Men's Football and Basketball programs (the only two programs that actually make money potentially)?? I think not. The university years are prime time for learning the facts of life, and Universities are no longer made of money, it is long past time for a return of good sense to University Sports Programs. We should no longer work for equal participation or equal number of events, we should make the public sector subsidy for men's sports and women's sports equal, and if they can parley that seed money into more by drawing in revenue then more power to them. Equal opportunity and equal support, not equal results, is what is right.
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