I Watch Women’s Sports

The women won me over one athlete at a time, and a boy did the rest Continue reading on Fourth Wave »

WOMEN’S SPORTS

The women won me over one athlete at a time, and a boy did the rest

I never had much use for sports. Growing up, what I saw was men being macho, and macho made me uncomfortable. Athletes, in my experience, translated into bullies, and the bullies were the ones making my everyday life miserable. So I did the sensible thing a kid does when something hurts. I built distance. A healthy wall between me and sports, and between me and the jocks on the other side of it. By the time I was grown, the wall was just part of the architecture. Sports were what other people cared about.

What slowly got through the wall was the women.

It started young and by accident. I grew up watching tennis and figure skating, usually because the Olympics were on, or because it was Wimbledon fortnight and the television was tuned to it. My parents were golf fans, so every Sunday, a tournament was played in the background. I’ll say this for the PGA: the hushed voices of the announcers gave me some of the best naps of my life. But when the LPGA was on, something was different. I stayed awake. I couldn’t have told you why at the time.

The WNBA started in 1997, and my interest grew like a slow tide, an inch at a time over the years. In 2001, I watched Jennie Finch, probably the most famous softball player who ever lived, put together a perfect 32–0 season at Arizona, the only one in NCAA softball history, throwing no-hitters on the way to a national title, and then go to Athens in 2004 and bring home Olympic gold.

The basketball stayed a slow roll for me right up until Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese met in the 2024 NCAA final, a game that felt like a brawl waiting to happen, all that talent and animosity crammed into forty minutes, and then both of them went straight to the pros.

In 2024, the PWHL finally started playing, after years of false starts for women’s professional hockey. Soccer barely registered for me, with one exception that kept repeating: the United States women’s national team kept winning Olympic gold, in 1996, then 2004, 2008, 2012, and again in 2024. Then I watched “Ted Lasso,” the show about an English men’s football club, and I’ll admit it was great. Did it make me a fan of men’s soccer? It did not. I started tuning in to the NWSL. What did you expect?

I’ll put in a word here for women’s beach volleyball, too. Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor were two of the best players on the planet for the better part of a decade, winning three straight Olympic golds from 2004 to 2012. I never missed those matches.

Through all of this, I could not have been paid to watch men play sports. With one standing exception: the Super Bowl. For the commercials, obviously.

But there was a second thread running beneath the entire timeline, and it became the exception that actually mattered.

Learning the men’s side

Women’s gymnastics was always there. I watched it now and then, the way you watch something every four years and then forget about it. Then I became a mother, and everything about how I watched it changed. My youngest son wanted to watch gymnastics, so that’s what we did, the two of us, in front of the television. And then that same kid got a little older and decided he didn’t want to be a gymnast. He needed to be one. I mean that exactly. It wasn’t a preference. It was an imperative that he could not be talked out of.

There was a problem. Eastern South Dakota did not have men’s gymnastics coaches. So I changed jobs. I changed my schedule. Then, with my son as my only athlete, I became a gymnastics coach four hours a day, six days a week, and I learned men’s artistic gymnastics from the ground up, the way a coach has to learn it and not the way a fan picks it up from the couch. Six events instead of the women’s four. Floor, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars, and high bar. I learned why the iron cross on still rings is a feat of raw strength that looks like stillness, why the pommel horse is the event that quietly breaks people, why a clean release-and-catch on high bar should terrify everyone watching and usually doesn’t, because the gymnast made it look easy.

So yes, I’ll admit to an affinity for men’s artistic gymnastics, at any level. If there’s one men’s sport that gets watched in my house, it’s that one. When Stephen Nedoroscik took off his glasses at the 2024 Paris Olympics and hit a pommel horse routine that helped the American men win their first team medal in sixteen years, then took an individual bronze of his own, I wasn’t watching a meme. I was watching the one men’s event I’d spent years learning to read, finally getting seen. And I’m still coaching today, ten years later, working with little boys learning the art of controlling their bodies and defying gravity, though not as many hours a week as I once put in.

That’s the exception. It’s specific, it’s personal, and it’s earned. Everything else points the other way, and it’s worth being honest about why.

What I walked away from

Here is the part that connects back to that wall I built as a kid. When I look at men’s professional sports now, I see the grown-up version of exactly what I walked away from. The macho posturing. The entitlement. The sense that the games exist to give a certain kind of man a stage. I’m not going to dress that up as a clean statistic. The honest version is narrower than the slogan. Studies of arrest records actually find that NFL players, for one, get arrested at lower rates than the national average for men their age. But certain categories, domestic violence among them, were a problem the leagues spent years refusing to take seriously, and the culture that allowed that is the same culture I recognized on the playground a long time ago. I don’t enjoy watching it. After everything, I think that’s allowed to be a reason.

There is a second reason, and it’s even more honest. I will never reach the athletic level of an elite man, and I know exactly why. The performance gap between top men and top women is real and well measured. It runs around ten to twelve percent across most running events, a little narrower in the shortest sprints and wider at the longest distances. Men carry more muscle, denser bone, higher testosterone, and a bigger engine: elite women’s peak oxygen uptake runs roughly ten to twenty percent below men’s, depending on the sport. None of that is in dispute, and I have no interest in pretending it away.

What they do with it

Here’s the turn. That gap is the whole reason the women move me. When the ceiling was lower, and the resources were thinner for most of the sport’s history, every inch of mastery had to be fought for against the grain. Men’s excellence, I can admire the way I admire a tall building. Women’s excellence. I admire the way I admire someone who built the building after being told for a century she couldn’t hold a hammer.

Look at what they do with it.

Lindsey Vonn won four overall World Cup titles and an Olympic downhill gold, the first ever for an American woman, and retired in 2019 with 82 World Cup victories, the most by any woman at the time. In 2012, she asked to race a men’s World Cup downhill. The international federation said no, ruling that one gender isn’t entitled to enter the other’s races. She was candid that she’d be only averagely competitive against the men. The point was never to win. The point was to measure herself against the fastest skiers alive.

When she finally skied the men’s Streif course at Kitzbühel in 2023, the run that terrifies the men who race it for time, she came down and said she had even more respect for them now. Then she returned to ski racing at 40, after a partial knee replacement. At forty, she became the oldest woman ever to reach a World Cup podium, and the following season, at forty-one, she won a World Cup downhill outright, the oldest racer of any gender ever to win one. That is what working for every advantage looks like.

Simone Biles is the most decorated gymnast in history, with 41 Olympic and World Championship medals between them, and five skills named after her because no one else will attempt them. The federation that governs her sport has at times deliberately scored her hardest skills lower than their difficulty warrants, openly, to keep other women from breaking themselves trying to copy her.

Think about what that means. She is so far ahead that the rulebook treats her as a hazard. In Tokyo, she pulled herself out of finals when she lost her air awareness in the middle of a twisting vault, a genuinely dangerous thing, and took the public heat for putting her body and mind first. Then she took two years away, came back, and won three more golds in Paris. The men’s side of her sport is the one I coach. I watch her side because I’m seeing the outer limit of what a human body can be taught to do.

The whole history in one paycheck

And then there’s Caitlin Clark again, because her story is the one that shows you the machinery at work. She left Iowa as the all-time leading scorer in NCAA Division I basketball, women’s or men’s, with 3,951 points. The 2024 national championship game she played in drew 18.9 million viewers and outdrew the men’s final for the first time in history.

When the Indiana Fever made her the number one pick, her rookie salary was $76,535. The man taken first in that year’s NBA draft signed for a first-year salary north of $12.5 million. One finance professor’s analysis credited Clark with roughly a quarter of the WNBA’s economic activity in her rookie season. She moved the entire market, and she was paid like an intern.

That contrast is the whole history of women’s sports compressed into one paycheck. The talent was always there. The investment wasn’t made, and the missing investment was used as proof that demand didn’t exist, which justified withholding the investment all over again. It was a closed loop, and the women were trapped inside it.

The loop is finally breaking, and you can watch it in real numbers. In 2025, Clark missed much of the season due to injury, and the WNBA’s audience held steady while its attendance climbed to a record 3.15 million. The boom turned out to be bigger than any one player. In early 2026, the league signed a new labor deal that ties salaries to revenue for the first time in the history of women’s professional sports, raised the team salary cap from about $1.5 million to $7 million, and pushed the average salary from roughly $120,000 toward $583,000. Clark’s own salary jumped from that $76,535 to around half a million. The pioneers are starting to get paid as though the thing they built has value, because it does.

I won’t oversell the case that the women’s game is simply better to watch, because part of that is taste. Fans talk about teamwork over isolation, fundamentals over showboating, and a style closer to what the games were invented for. Some of that is real, and some of it is just what I happen to like. But the parts that aren’t subjective are striking.

Women’s sports fans are the most engaged audience in sports by some measures. Tickets are affordable. The fan culture is warm in a way that the men’s leagues, with their corporate boxes and their swagger, mostly stopped being a long time ago. The 2023 Women’s World Cup drew nearly two million fans in person. Women’s elite sport crossed a billion dollars in annual revenue for the first time in 2024. This is not charity. People are showing up.

How recent all of this is

But the thing that organizes all of it, the fact I keep circling back to, is how recent this is. Title IX became law on June 23, 1972. It’s younger than plenty of people who are still going to work every morning. The law itself says nothing about sports. It only says that no one can be shut out of an educational program because of their sex. In 1971, the year before it passed, about 295,000 girls played high school sports in this country, roughly one in twenty-seven. Today, it’s about 3.4 million, roughly two in five. The women I idolize are the second generation, maybe the third, to grow up legally entitled to a place on the field.

That history isn’t finished, and I won’t pretend it is. Title IX never required equal money, and the money still isn’t equal. Fifty years after the law was passed, girls were being offered fewer athletic opportunities than boys had been before the law existed. The gap moved. It didn’t close.

But that’s the point. The excellence I’m watching is brand new. Jennie Finch’s perfect season, Lindsey Vonn outracing her own age, Simone Biles rewriting what a body can do, Caitlin Clark out-drawing the men who were supposed to be the main event, all of it is happening inside a window that opened in my own lifetime, against a head start the men got measured in centuries. I don’t watch the women because the men aren’t good. I watch them because they have to earn, in fifty years, the standing the men inherited, and they’re doing it right in front of us, and I don’t want to look away.

The wall I built as a kid is still there, mostly. I still can’t make myself care about the men’s leagues that grew out of the playground I couldn’t wait to leave. But two things got through it. The women, who won me over one athlete at a time, until I was the person staying awake for the LPGA and never missing a beach volleyball match. And a small boy who decided he needed to fly, in the one men’s sport I’ll always make room for, because I’m the one who taught it to him.

I watch everything else on the women’s side because they taught it to themselves.

Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.

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