Nearly every Power 5 athletic department mentioned its men’s sports programs more than its women’s sports programs on X (formerly Twitter) according to a new ESPN study.
ESPN reporters Paula Lavigne and Shwetha Surendran looked at 3,200 posts per account on average from the winter of 2018 to the winter of 2023. Notre Dame was the most biased toward men while Texas actually leaned toward women’s sports programs. Most universities have more women’s sports programs than men’s sports programs.
Among the 17 schools whose women’s basketball team made the NCAA tourney while the men’s team did not, more than half still mentioned their men’s team more on X than the more successful women’s program.
Of the 124 most-posted about college athletes from the ESPN survey, 60 percent were men.
Social media managers within university athletic departments told ESPN they often used student workers and interns to post to X during the season because they did not have the staffing to cover every program.
ESPN also explored whether the incongruity could have legal implications under Title IX protections owed to women college athletes.
But “drawing that cause and effect is such a difficult thing,” a Title IX consultant told ESPN.
Still, the differences in attention clearly contribute to differences in marketing opportunities in the age of name, image and likeness. Athletes’ wallets are indirectly affected by how athletic departments choose to promote them. A local or national company is far more likely to give an NIL deal to someone they’ve heard of.
“When the NIL deals start coming in, that publicity machine continues to operate in the same manner that it always has, focusing on men and men’s sports,” Title IX attorney Lori Bullock told ESPN.
[ESPN]
