UPDATE (April 7, 2024, 5:11 p.m. ET): The undefeated South Carolina women’s squad held off Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes to win the Women’s March Madness championship on Sunday, 87-75.
2024 is shaping up to be a milestone year for women’s sports, both in terms of investment and engagement. Turns out, when you put effort and dollars into the infrastructure of the women’s game, people watch.
This year’s Women’s March Madness has been showcased on prime-time TV, while more and more outlets are maintaining regular and knowledgeable coverage of these athletes. The result has been gangbusters ratings — 14.2 million people tuned in to watch Friday’s Final Four matchup between Iowa and UConn — and, accordingly, headlines about the women’s tournament have at times outpaced the men’s. Today’s championship between Caitlin Clark-led Iowa and the undefeated South Carolina squad will be a game for the ages. As The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch put it, “Welcome to the motherf—— new world.”
Turns out, when you put effort and dollars into the infrastructure of the women’s game, people watch.
As viewership has continued to rise over the past few years, so too has betting on women’s sports. According to Maria Marino, host at The Action Network, FanDuel reports that LSU-Iowa was the top betting event on Monday, boasting a 28% increase in wagers over last year’s national championship game. Betting in the WNBA, which has a partnership with FanDuel, is similarly exploding. And this staggering growth is happening globally across women’s sports: Last year, a study published by the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) found that betting on soccer has grown by 20% annually since 2020, while tennis, basketball and cricket saw more than 10% annual growth from 2017 to 2022.
Sports betting clearly benefits women’s sports in many ways. It’s yet another metric to further prove their commercial viability, and points to the revenue they can generate. Money was always going to be the primary pathway to equality.
Women’s sports thus offer the purest distillation of the current landscape of sports betting, as well as its dilemmas. That is, if we can have an honest conversation about them. Part of achieving equality with men’s sports is being scrutinized fairly and to the same degree, whether we’re talking about trash-talking, problematic coaching behavior, or, now, the realities of betting.
Obviously more people watching translates to more people betting, but multiple studies have shown that betting itself can also drive higher viewership and fan engagement, for men’s and women’s sports alike. The NFL has long enjoyed an engagement boost from fans playing fantasy football, for example. Still, Marino is quick to note that she believes the betting is following the viewership, and not the other way around.
“When you become interested enough in something and you want to consume it and you feel you know enough about it, that’s when most casual bettors look to bet on a sport,” she told me. “So the increase in participation as far as betting on women’s basketball, it’s just another sign of the exploding interest in that sport and its popularity.”
To be sure, betting represents a new frontier in investment in women’s sports. “We talk about investment in terms of diversifying programming and marketing opportunities and advertisers. Sports betting brings in a whole new group of advertisers and stuff from the marketing side,” said Khristina Williams, a women’s basketball reporter and founder of Girls Talk Sports TV.
But that new frontier has quite a few potential pitfalls. In the past few years, as more states have legalized sports betting, more betting scandals have (unsurprisingly) come to light. Just in the last few weeks, the controversy around Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter and the NBA’s investigation into Jontay Porter prop bets have spurred a bevy of articles on the reckoning facing American sports when it comes to betting. Even those of us who still support legalization worry about the growing public health crisis of gambling addiction, particularly among younger bettors, challenges to the integrity of games, and increased harassment of athletes.
Women’s sports are not immune to those same issues. The IBIA report detailed several instances of match-fixing in women’s sports dating back more than a decade, stressing the need for leagues and governing bodies to get ahead of corruption by increasing monitoring and regulatory efforts and striving for pay equity. “Stakeholders should actively challenge the misconception that women’s sports are less susceptible to match-fixing,” the report states, adding that there could be a correlation between lower wages and an increased vulnerability to bribes.
“We should be having the same conversations for concerns and issues — and positives — that we’re having for men’s sports,” said Nicole Auerbach, a senior writer at The Athletic and a host for SiriusXM.








