The New Yorker:

Talented and charismatic stars, including Caitlin Clark, JuJu Watkins, and Paige Bueckers, have made the games appointment viewing.

By Louisa Thomas

For years, television ratings were taken as a proxy of the popularity of college basketball, and the numbers for women’s games weren’t very good. In 2019, to pick a typical year, about four million people watched Baylor beat Notre Dame for the women’s championship title, whereas nearly twenty million watched the University of Virginia’s men’s team beat Texas Tech. The discrepancy was so great that its meaning seemed obvious, at least to most people. You could argue about whether people’s preferences reflected an ideal world, but it was harder to argue with facts.

Those kinds of comparative figures were often used to justify, in one way or another, the gargantuan television contract that CBS and Turner paid for the men’s N.C.A.A. basketball championship and the pittance that ESPN paid for the women’s tournament, which was packaged with the rest of the channel’s N.C.A.A. sports deals. It was why the men got to use the March Madness branding and the women were not allowed. It was why the phrase “college basketball” always meant men’s college basketball, why men were always the default. It was why the Final Four was aired on network television, whereas the women’s final was on cable. It was why the weight room for the women at the 2021 N.C.A.A. tournament consisted of a stack of hand weights and a few yoga mats and the men were set up with a huge array of machines. Plenty of people thought that these differences were unfair—a TikTok video comparing the two weight rooms went viral—but they reflected what people seemed willing to pay for, the argument went at the time. Wasn’t that, in the usual arrangement of things, fair?

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