I was driving home last night listening to the local sports radio station. The show host was going on ad nauseam about how the women’s world cup victory in 1999 at the Rose Bowl was believed to be the start of a new era in women’s professional sports, and yet the potential of that moment has not really been recognized. He waxed rhapsodic about the need for women’s professional sports (ed: arguable) and the fact that just like the corporate glass ceiling there appeared to be a wall that women’s sports just hasn’t been able to break through.
Women’s professional sports will always be a charity event. For example, the WNBA could not exist with out the financial support of the men’s teams. It was tried a couple of years before the WNBA started and it collapsed. There is not now nor will there ever be a women’s professional league that can match the ticket sales and merchandising sales of the men’s professional leagues. This isn’t due to patriarchy or sexism, but rather due to the audience both male and female.
The radio host put his co-host on the spot by asking him why women’s professional sports don’t make money and don’t attract an audience. The co-host gave a very un-PC answer which I’m sure he’ll get in trouble for today. We’ll see. The co-host stated that all women’s sports are boring to watch. He said watching the WNBA was like watching a high school basketball team, not professional caliber athletes.
Several of the HBD bloggers have covered and/or discussed the fact that women’s IQ are more tightly clustered about the mean. There is even discussion that men’s average IQs could be as many as 7 points higher than women’s. In the HBD sphere it’s generally accepted that more men are on the tails of high and the low end of intelligence. The assumption is made that men are more expendable and therefore the agent of change or mutation within the species. I’m paraphrasing here.
But what if intelligence or g isn’t the only area where women are more tightly clustered about the mean. I suspect that physical ability, strength, speed, agility, reflexes, endurance, etc. could also be more broadly distributed in the male half of the species. Looking at men and women it is quite obvious that the average in these attributes will be higher in men than in women. Assuming this wider distribution in abilities exists, it could explain the quite obvious lack of depth in the talent pool for women’s sports as Chuck over at Gucci Little Piggy has pointed out.
Professional sports is a money making endeavor. There has to be an audience. Men have historically been and probably always will be the primary consumers of sports (And any ‘sport’ that requires subjective judging and scoring is not truly a sport). Boys and men identify with their sports heroes. The competition, the sacrifice, and the pain. All of it. It is why they watch. It is also why they typically don’t watch women’s sports. They don’t identify with the women and the level of competition is truly pathetic.
A smaller group of women will willingly watch sports, but their motivation to watch is different than men. Men watch sports and want to be that guy, women watch sports and want to be with that guy. There just isn’t any real demand to watch women’s professional sports. No demand, no audience, no money.
