Study finds women’s games underrepresented in sports betting coverage

Despite the growing popularity of women’s sports, media coverage of sports betting has not given them more attention, according to research by Brian Petrotta, an assistant professor of sports media and communication at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

The forthcoming study, “The gender dichotomy of wagering expertise: A content analysis of Daily Wager/ESPN BET Live shows during March Madness,” was recently honored by the Broadcast Education Association. Petrotta and co-author Travis Bell of the University of South Florida analyzed four years of March Madness sports betting coverage to examine how the women’s tournament is represented.

“It’s not going away, so it’s about being clear about what sports betting is and when or why it’s OK to do it,” Petrotta said. “When I talk about it as a market, it’s different from a sound financial investment. As sports media professionals, we can present sports betting as what it is, and people will still enjoy it and maybe understand it better than as a get-rich-quick scheme.”

Petrotta has also taught a special topics course about reporting on sports betting.

The study examined ESPN wagering shows aired during March Madness from 2021 to 2024. The team looked at questions like how much time is spent on women’s sports, how prominently female broadcasters are featured and who was recommending bets during the show.

“We’ve kind of hit an inflection point with women’s sports where it’s more popular than it’s ever been, it’s more visible than it’s ever been, and that’s kind of come up alongside this spread of sports betting,” Petrotta said. “We wanted to see, how are we treating women’s sports from a sports betting-specific perspective.”

They found programming dedicated roughly 10% of airtime to the women’s tournament with the rest spent on the men’s, and less than 9% of picks recommended were related to the women’s tournament. Female broadcasters accounted for about 16% of on-air talent making betting recommendations.

Petrotta said the data on sports betting reflected traditional patterns in sports media generally, which trended toward less coverage of women’s sports and fewer female broadcasters on the air.

“There are certain areas in sports media we ‘allow’ women to be a part of, like the sideline reporter for football,” Petrotta said. “That’s a role that’s almost exclusively women; we don’t see a lot of women in play-by-play. Maybe women’s sports is there but it isn’t the thing that leads off the sportscast. It’s still kind of confined to these pockets.

“Most of sports betting is conducted by men and predominantly on men’s sports, but the flip side is if you put women’s sports in prime time and you have high production value for women’s games, people will watch.”

Petrotta said one surprise from the data was that the rise in popularity for women’s sports in recent years did not correlate to an increase in coverage during the window they studied. The final year, 2024, was the year former Iowa women’s basketball star Caitlin Clark was at the height of her popularity and more eyes were on the women’s tournament than ever before. However, Petrotta said, this did not translate to much change in coverage in the sports betting field.

“There were more people watching the women’s tournament than the men’s tournament,” he said. “Here we have this generational superstar, so obviously they would talk about it more in 2024 than in 2021, and that really wasn’t the case. The discussions tended to be centered on Caitlin Clark and less about individual games, but in terms of the amount of time and betting recommendations, it didn’t really change at all.”

They also noted that the programs recommended a wider variety of bets during the men’s tournament than the women’s. For example, analysts might make picks only about the winner of a women’s game and a point spread, while for a men’s game they might also discuss odds on how many three-pointers a certain player would make or other more specific game stats.

Their research also observed that experts brought on air to discuss women’s games were more likely to have a former coach or player analyze game play, while many of the broadcasters speaking about the men’s games did not have the same background in the sport, but were brought on as experts specifically on betting.

“When talking about women’s sports, they would often break down the Xs and Os,” Petrotta said. “They didn’t always recommend bets necessarily. With the people talking about men’s sports, they generally were not coaches; they were not former players, so that’s something that’s probably worth exploring more from a credibility standpoint.”

Moving forward, Petrotta said research on sports betting demonstrates how sports media professionals can — and perhaps should — provide better education to audiences about the meaning behind elements like the creation of betting lines. He said broadcasters during the 2024 women’s tournament were a good example of this, explaining to new audiences how sportsbooks arrived at the line for Caitlin Clark’s points per game.

“I think we can do a better job of explaining odds and what they mean,” Petrotta said. “There’s a number of sports fans who have no idea what those numbers mean. So we can be transparent with what this is and provide more education about how these odds come about.”

Petrotta said those in sports media can better serve audiences by helping people grasp that understanding the game is different from understanding how the betting market works.

“It helps pop that myth of ‘I think I know sports, so I’m going to be successful at sports betting,’” Petrotta said. “Unlike a lottery ticket, which we know is luck, with sports betting, we think our knowledge is so good that we have a better chance of winning this.”