Women’s sport experienced an incredible surge in viewership and attendance during the 2023 summer season across two major sports leagues, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), as well as two major sport tournaments, the Women’s World Cup (WWC) and the U.S. Open. In total, billions engaged with women’s sport content and hundreds of millions either watched an event or attended live. These incredible numbers are largely thanks to the consistent increase in marketing and promotional efforts of women’s sport as a whole, and follow through on the eagerly anticipated growth in the market for women’s sport over the past few years.

All viewership and attendance numbers represent increases from the previous event and/or league totals across both viewership and in-person attendance.

These summer jumps in viewership and attendance are on the heels of the most watched NCAA women’s basketball tournament over its roughly 40 year history. An estimated 10 million viewers tuned in to the 2023 championship game between LSU and Iowa, numbers that have similarly been credited to increases in marketing and promotional efforts. Specifically, for only the second season, the NCAA women’s basketball tournament was provided the ability to utilize the widely recognized ‘March Madness’ branding, which, for the previous 40 years, had been reserved solely for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Providing objective evidence to support the claim that, just as in professional women’s sport, preferences do not develop in isolation of consistent, creative, and meaningful marketing and promotional efforts.

According to Jane McManus, Executive Director of the Center for Sports Media at Seton Hall University, the recent surge in viewership and attendance is directly tied to new thought processes on how to effectively invest in women’s sport. “There's been a lot of analysis done on the market [for women’s sport] for the first time ever. Who is a women's sports fan? What do they buy? How do they spend their money? What do they want to see? As opposed to [the fact that] there's often been a suppression of the marketplace because you have people who really care about men's sports who don't really want to have to ask those questions about women's sports. They don't want to address the marketplace. They're very comfortable addressing the marketplace for men's sports and calling it a day.”

The surges in viewership and attendance for these professional leagues and tournaments bode well for the upcoming fall and winter seasons in professional and collegiate women’s sport. Recent record-breaking events, such as Nebraska’s women’s volleyball match against Omaha which drew an attendance record for women's sport with 92,003 fans, displays the incredible growth and future potential of women’s sport fandom. It is also becoming clear that organizations and broadcasters are taking notice.

According to McManus, “The broadcasters are getting smarter because their ratings are showing them that they need to spend more time thinking about [women’s sport]. I think women at the VP level, and you are getting some of those rise, like at Google GOOG , are asking their companies why they're investing in men's and not spending sponsorship dollars on women's sports as well. So I think that is going to change the way that a lot of people look at how they're presenting women's sports on television.”