Is Sports' Gender Gap Closing? Some Data Suggests So.

Golf’s gold rush hasn’t been limited to just the men, as evidenced by the increasing purses in women’s majors.

In the discussions around the PGA Tour, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia and LIV Golf, one big part of the golf equation has been ignored: women’s golf.

Women’s sports are one of the bigger growth areas in the industry, and Burke Magnus, the president of content at ESPN, went even further in a recent interview with Richard Deitsch of The Athletic.

“I think the LPGA could be a sleeping giant,” Magnus said. “Golf is a sport that is, in an odd way, kind of custom-made for today’s media environment, which is to say there’s tons of content where fans tend to have favorite players because it’s an individual sport. Even if your player is not on the top of the leaderboard, you can stream any portion of a golf tournament at any point over the four days and watch your player either live or on demand.

“It’s weirdly a perfect sport for the digital environment. Obviously, the PGA Tour and the majors pull big audiences on linear. I like the future that golf has in this country, both men’s and women’s.”

The Aramco Team Series, backed by the Saudi Arabia oil company, started in 2021 and is played all around the world, with Nelly Korda winning the most recent event in London.

What started with four destinations has grown to five in 2023 and is just the latest in a long line of positive moves for women’s golf.

Toss in the rise in major-championship prize money—$11 million in the U.S. Women’s Open, $10 million for the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship and $9 million at the AIG Women’s Open, all substantial increases from 2014, when the U.S. Women’s Open purse was the largest at $4 million—and it’s clear to see how Magnus’s crystal ball may be accurate.

Women follow sports in a similar way to men, including how they wager. With England in the World Cup final in Australia, the Lionesses have been getting betting interest not by just men but women as well.

According to research by Entain, a European gambling group, one-fifth of bets on England’s first three games were placed by women at Ladbrokes and Coral bookmakers in the U.K.

Women also placed an average of 21% of the bets on the Women’s World Cup, compared to 17% in the 2022 Women’s Euros and 13% during the last World Cup in ’19.

The Entain report also stated that the USWNT's opening game vs. Vietnam saw three times the number of bets compared to Lionel Messi’s debut for Inter Miami CF at BetMGM.

“As this Women’s World Cup is proving, the interest from fans is there, which paves the way for women’s sport to gain bigger audiences, more media attention and more avenues for aspiring female athletes around the world to take up sports professionally,” said Dominic Grounsell, Entain’s chief commercial officer.

What does this mean for the future of women’s sports? It’s just one of many data points, but they are all positive data points and may get women and men closer to parity in the future.