Even the NCAA’s own website shows a gender discrepancy between the Men’s and Women’s NCAA Basketball tournament, a.k.a “March Madness. The “NCAA March Madness” iPhone app actually completely fails to include any part of the Women’s Tournament.
The numbers regarding digital coverage between men’s and women’s college basketball are staggering. As I mentioned, on the NCAA website, men’s basketball is three times more likely to appear on the homepage as the leading image than women’s. The men are twice as likely to be featured in the top headlines when entering the page.
On ESPN, its home page (ESPN.com) features the Men’s March Madness Tournament nine times more often than the women’s tournament at the very top of the website, and on the front page as a whole, men are three times more likely to be featured.
Of 57 ESPN television shows, 27 did not mention women’s college basketball once, in a review by “ThinkProgress” during the week of March 27- April 2, 2017.
In this study conducted by ThinkProgress, websites were monitored three times a day, and twice during the weekends.
CBS Sports owns the rights to the men’s tournament and produces the app, which does not include women’s scores.
On NCAA.com, men’s basketball took up to 72 percent of the college basketball coverage on the front page. There were 495 headlines about men’s basketball that week, as opposed to only 108 about women’s.
On ESPN.com, men’s basketball made the front page 70 times, while women’s made it 23. Bringing it to being a ‘featured’ headline on the website, the men were given the spot on the homepage 26 times, while the stories about women only appeared 3 times.
The headline “Full NCAA Tournament Coverage” redirects you to the men’s tournament only, while there was regularly great coverage on espnW for the women’s tournament.
