Episode 139: The Political Economy of Women's Sport

You're listening to The End of Sport Podcast, a podcast about harm, labor, and inequality in capitalist sport with your host, Johanna Melis, Nathan Coleman-Liam, and Derek Silva. The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at HarbingerMediaNetwork.com. And as always, if you're enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and please leave us a five-star review as those always help us reach a wider audience. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy this episode of The End of Sport. Hi friends and welcome to another episode of The End of Sport Podcast. My name is Nathan Coleman-Liam and I have the pleasure today of being joined by both of my friends and co-host Johanna Melis, hey Johanna. Hey everyone, glad to actually be here today. And Derek Silva, hey Derek, wow, all three of us pretty wild. It is. It's a wild one today. And a really important topic for us all to convene around, which is something we've talked about in various ways. It comes up at times, but we're really trying to center the crucial and unbelievably timely topic really of the political economy of women's sport. Things of how value is produced, how value is distributed, to what extent is exploitative, to what extent is popular. We really try to dig into all of that. And we do so with our guests today, I really, a person incredibly well positioned to speak on this topic, having written about it for years, and also having a brand new book on the subject. And that person is Dr. David Berry and the book is slaying the trolls, why the trolls are very, very wrong about women and sports. And that book is co-authored with Dr. Nefertiti Walker, who we really, really had also hoped to have on the show. But unfortunately, scheduling issues just made it absolutely impossible. So we did move on with this recording with her blessing, just the four of us. And it's really a terrific conversation. So I can't wait to share that with you, and we're going to turn it over in a second. But just before we do that, I'm going to make another plug, another shameless plug, which is that Derek and I also have a book that we're hawking. And our book is called The End of College Football on the Human Cost of an All American Game. Unlike Dr. Berry and Walker's book, it is not currently available, slaying the trolls is out now. And so you should get your hands on it immediately. Our book won't be coming out until late November, early December. But it is available to pre-order now. And you can do so from the UNC website using the code zero one social 30 to save 30% when ordering. I really hope that you do that. I think you'll like the book. So with that, let me shift what we turn it over to the episode. David Berry is Professor of Economics at Southern Utah University, where he studies the economics of sport. He is lead author of The Wages of Winds and Stumbling on Winds, sole author of Sports Economics and co-author with Never TV Walker of the brand new book Slaying the Trolls, why the trolls are very, very wrong about women and sports. Dr. Berry, welcome to the show today. Thanks for having me. What I want to do today is unpack a subject that is perhaps as or more relevant than any effort or right now. And also one we have not yet adequately I would say explored in the show, which is to say the political economy of women's sport. There is a tremendous amount of literature and discussion about gender and sport broadly speaking. And oftentimes I would say that really focuses on questions of representation. But what we want to talk about here today is the question of how value is produced and distributed in women's sport, which does include the issue of fandom, which is to say the market of consumers, but it's also about the subject of labor and exploitation. But before we get into all that in a more granular way, can you start by sharing for listeners what they can expect in Slaying the Trolls, what is the project of the book and its overarching argument, and how is that argument advanced? This is sort of the essence of what we're getting at in the book. The book is based on academic research, but also a lot of things that were written for the popular media. And the way the book is written, it's a trade book, it's not really written as a scholarly exercise. It's written mostly what it's written for is fans of women's sports and to give them some way of pushing back at the very large number of people who come after and criticize women's sports, primarily who are men. And so whenever women's sports are discussed in social media, what will happen, and this is especially true if it's a woman discussing it, a personal show up usually a man again. And they will offer criticism of women's sports, such as there are no fans of women's sports, women are not sports fans, women aren't very good at sports, women can't be coaches and sports, women, the reason why women don't make any money at sports is because no one watches women's sports. So the idea of the book is to go through and say why all of that is wrong, why is that wrong? And then when we talk about why differences do exist in terms of consumer demand, why do those differences exist in terms of the economics and the history of sports? So that's an essence of what the book is about. Great, thank you for that. And I wanted to dive a bit more into some of the, like you just went through a list of some of the questions that people and kind of claims that people make with respect to why women's sports, why they, why they're not valued. And I was wondering if you could dive into them a little bit more and perhaps also talk about where do we typically hear them from? Do we hear them from, you know, men's sports figures? Do we hear them from commentators to what extent do you hear them in the classroom? And that sort of thing sort of where, where do these arguments come from and dive a little bit more into what they are? Well, you hear them everywhere, right? You hear the, obviously as I mentioned on social media, you hear them, but it's not just social media, you hear this from, from male commentators and sports. It is, is, when, when women's sports get discussed, we start off the book by noting that Clay Travis who works at Fox Sports did a long, angry rant last summer about how nobody watches the WNBA and he expects that a high school boys team could beat the Las Vegas aces who won the championship. So the troll behavior is not just among men with, you know, 50 Twitter followers. It's also among very prominent male figures and sports. Who are, you know, I think it's pretty obvious when you listen to their comments. These are men who are very much threatened by women in the sports world. To them, sports are their domain. Women are not welcome there and they, they don't want women interfering in this. And so when women show up and women are talked about and women are playing this, they appear to be extremely threatened. They're very insecure about all this. So they lash out and they, and they come back and they come up with, you know, again, silly arguments such as, you know, high school boys team can be the WNBA champions. That's, that's the kind of thing that you hear from them. And again, you know, our idea was, you know, why don't we write a book saying, okay, let's think about what you're saying and why that would be ridiculous. And go through the evidence because I think what ends up happening is that it's obvious that the people who are making these arguments are sexists. So that's true. But if all you say to somebody like Clay Travis is your sexist, well, I think he already knows that. So that's not really a rebuttal to what he's saying. I think you have to go through and say, okay, what you're saying is actually just ridiculous. And this is why it's ridiculous, you have to go through and explain the reasons why it's ridiculous. And that's where we're coming from. So probably them in our view, the sort of predominant argument that's used to account for why less value has been produced in women's sport is that there's supposedly no market for it. And since sport, and we've talked about this on the show quite a lot, it is a form of commodity spectacle. Value is only or solely produced through athletic labor if there are consumers who are willing to then pay to watch it. So I guess the question here is a little bit twofold. You've already gone and gone into some of this in a little bit of detail, but one, is there a market for women's sports and we suppose that there is? And if there is, why haven't we seen capitalism does what it kind of does and capitalize on this potential source of value production? All right, so is there a market? Obviously, there is. We know there's a market. We've known this for a very long time. There have been a variety of sporting events involving women that have managed to attract thousands and thousands of fans. One of the early examples of this in history is during World War I, the men's soccer leagues in England, of course, couldn't operate because the athletes were fighting in the war. So women started putting on soccer matches. And by the time you get to around 19, 2021, a women's soccer match was attracted something like 50,000 fans. So that establishes, okay, there's a market. Somebody be willing to watch this. What soon after happened though is the men of soccer in England shut it down. They made it so that effectively they banned women's soccer for the next 50 years. They made it so that it could not actually happen because they wouldn't allow the women to use the pitches and they wouldn't let women have, they wouldn't allow referees to participate in their events. So they effectively banned this. So a market existed and the men shut it down. And you can see that the same evidence of a market whenever there are national events. So women's soccer in the U.S. on the national level obviously attracts very, very large crowds. And the same thing is true in basketball. The women's professional leagues that we see right now in basketball at the WMBA comes about because of the 1996 Olympics, which established that there was a market for women's basketball. Here is the issue though. And I think this is the problem in studying sports is there's a tendency among scholars, especially among economists, to think about sports purely in the same way that we think about and we talk about this in the book, the way you would think about owning a Taco Bell or the way you think about owning a cardboard factory. So when you own a business, if you've sat through an economics course, they will point out that what the argument made is that what drives the investor is profits. And so that's the story that they're telling. In sports, that's not quite the whole story. People do not get involved in sports purely to make a profit. They get involved in sports because they love sports. One of the stories that we tell in the book is the story of Art Rooney starting up the Pittsburgh Steelers. So just to paint a picture of what's going on when he does this, it's 1933, it's Pittsburgh, it's the middle of the Great Depression. The National Football League has been around for 12 years, they have no fans. Failure rate of franchises, and by failure we mean you lost your entire investment and you've gone bankrupt and you can no longer fund this, you have lost all your money. So failure rate is 90% of the franchises that were started at this time period went out of business. He decides in that environment to start an NFL team in Pittsburgh. And he puts in, I think it was something like $15,000 of his own money, he owned a supporting good story. He's not a very wealthy man. And not only does he invest the money, he keeps investing in it, even though it's losing, it's not losing enough for him to go out of business, but it's not making him money. But he keeps putting money in this and he does it year after year, decade after decade. And not only does he do it and lose money, the Steelers are awful, they don't win anything. They go to one playoff game in 40 years and in that game they score no points. The first time Art Rooney ever saw his Steelers score a touchdown in the playoffs in his life was in 1972 and it was the immaculate reception. That was his first touchdown, it was a miracle. And he waited 40 years to see it. That story highlights the fact that investment in sports and men's sports is often about emotional attachment, it's not about profit. On the women's side you don't see that, women's sports get treated very much like as if it is a Taco Bell. And when the profits don't appear immediately, the investor gives up. But the problem with that is in professional sports, profits would not appear. There's no example that I've seen where profits in a men's team sports, such as National Football League, Manjuli Baseball, NBA, NHL, English Premier League. Profits don't show up initially, fans don't show up initially, it takes decades to build your fan base. And so you have to keep putting money in this for decades. You don't see this on the women's side, there's just this unwillingness to keep putting money towards something. And it's constantly the case that when women talk about their sports leagues, they are constantly being asked this question, do you make money? Men don't get asked that question nearly as often. Major League soccer in the United States does not make money. The United Football League, the rocks, minor of football league, does not make money. Baseball does not make money. The NBA, for decades, has claimed it doesn't make money. So no one requires this, but it's required of women. So that's a long answer to your question, but I think we have to understand that aspect of sports. Wow, that was such an excellent answer because you brought in a lot of really rich historical examples. So as the historian, there are just a few things I wanted to emphasize. I don't have a question. It's more a conflict than a question, but I think between when you're talking about women's sports being shut down after World War II, and Britain forcibly shut down essentially. And then obviously there's this argument that you make about how with men's sport, it's more of an emotional attachment, whereas women's sport, it seemed purely from sort of a cost-benefit analysis, from what I understand of what you said, right? I think it's really interesting, right, is that part of what it seems that you all are doing and building on the scholarship that exists is showing how much kind of historical erasure there is and historical revisionism. There has been, when we're talking about what, like even talking today about to what extent do markets exist and to people, you know, or there are enough people interested in women's sports. And what you're talking about is that, like, yes, not only has there, have there been longstanding interests in women's sports, but also there have been interests of women's sports that have been purposefully shut down in order to benefit or reinvigorate the support in the fandom and hopefully the money that will come out of men's sport. And I think when we're talking about gender broadly, and I'll kind of get back to what you're discussing, but when we're talking about gender and sexism and patriarchy broadly and men's and women's sport, there's so much discussion about how about not just state sport, but also kind of individual capitalist interests in sport. And I think this idea, if we're talking about, for example, transphobia, that, like, we have to protect women's sport at all costs, so much of that transphobia, excuse me, stems from the fact that women's sport has existed for a long time, and it's really men that have been trying to shut down women's opportunities again and again and again in order to prevent women from beating men, right? This idea that a women's sport become, if we allow it to become as popular and successful as it could be by giving women equitable opportunities as men, then women's sports might overcome men's sports in terms of the popularity and the money that are made. And also women might defeat men, male athletes. And so I'm kind of expanding a lot from what you're talking about, but I think in terms of connecting the historical examples that you're providing to many of the other discussions we've had on the podcast, I think it's really interesting this historical revisionism in the work that you two are doing with the book in building on this scholarship that exists to show, again and again, how much more willing men have been historically to invest money and lose money on men's sport when they're absolutely not willing to do the same in women's sport. Yeah, exactly, that's exactly right. And I think when it comes to, we talk about this in the book as well, is this idea going back to that comment that Clay Travis had that high school boys team could be at WNB18. There's this, men are very threatened by the idea of women winning at sports and defeating them at sports. This is actually just a cliche, right, in television shows and movies of a woman triumphant over a man in an athletic contest, men have trouble accepting that that's possible. Even though, of course, it has to be possible, right, that the overlap and athletic ability between the genders, it's not too independent distributions. There's a substantial overlap, the fastest women in just in terms of running, they would be faster than 99% of men. So that has to be true. And we point out in the book that when it comes to something like running, as the distance gets longer and longer and longer, the gap between the best men and women gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until it's argued that when you get to the ultra-marathons where they're running something like 200 miles at a time, women overcome men and they tend to win those races. So there is, it is possible for women to be men, but this is an argument that we deal with in the book in a way that I think people often don't think about it this way. We make the argument in the book and this is the way I like to put it. Women don't have to be men at sports to be better than men at sports. So that's the statement. So women don't have to be men at sports to be better than men at sports. And you think about that statement and you're like, well, that doesn't make any sense. How can you be better than somebody but not actually win? And the answer to that is if you think about boxing. So in boxing, men will argue all the time when they're asked, who are the best boxers? They will say something like, the best boxer in the world right now is Kenola Alvarez. He's a middleweight or the best boxer of all time is Floyd Mayweather, another middleweight. And so, and you sit there and you think about that for a second, you're like, well, wait a minute. You can't be right. You can't argue that a man who weighs 140, 150, 160 pounds is truly the best boxer in the world when we know there exists men who weigh 250, 270 pounds who are also boxers. Clearly, you wouldn't want to have 160 pound guy try and beat a 270 pound guy. That wouldn't work. In fact, you don't even let those fights happen. That's against the rules. But men are totally okay with this. I'm okay with arguing that the smaller man is the better boxer because against his competition, he does better than the heavyweight does against his competition. So therefore, he's better. Okay. Well, then let's follow that logic then. Then women therefore can be better than men because women do better against their competition. Then men do against their competition. Caitlin Clark dominates college basketball, goes to the WNBA and we've discovered in her first two games, it turns out she's not the best basketball player in the world. The WNBA has the best basketball players in the world and when she is now right now going up against them, well, she doesn't know as much as they do right now. These are athletes who played a lot longer than she has. They know more than she does. So right now in her first couple games, she struggled quite a bit. And so she's not the best in that group. So we understand that it's relative to your competition that you're supposed to be best or not best. And I think this is something that people have trouble understanding when it comes to evaluating athletes. That men are very comfortable with the idea that best in class is all that matters in evaluating men. But when it comes to women, suddenly it's absolutely best that matters. You've got to be absolutely better for it to be valid. And we argue in the book, no, it's still just best in class. Serena Williams really is the best tennis player of all time. You really can't argue that. And there are women who are better than Michael Jordan at basketball. Yes, you can argue that because they did better against their competition than Michael Jordan did against his competition. So therefore, by your logic, they're better. So. Yeah. Absolutely. Of course, that is an important consideration, like this whole discussion of who is the best because it's always, as you say, this is like literally what the trolls have always advanced to disparage women's sport. It's kind of funny to me that recently people have like suddenly, it seemed like rediscovered that this is exactly like Bill Simmons, who at least for a long time was the most famous sports writer in the world, right? It was long saying this about women's basketball, like now when people revisit the comments that he made, you know, whatever was a decade or two ago, people are somewhat like shocked. That's such an offensive misogynistic comment, but like that was mainstream, something mainstream from to say that no one even blinked at it or, I mean, many people blinked at it, but I just mean it is from the terms of he wasn't canceled for it because in terms of mainstream discourse, it was acceptable for him to say that, right? So I completely understand, you know, why you have to take on those kind of trolling comments and that's part of the argument here when it comes to the economic dimensions of women's sport. But I also want to make sure that we keep digging in to those economic dimensions because I think, and we're going to get around to this. So this is still a bit of preliminary, but I think one thing we, and you do a great job of focusing on this, but one thing we have to talk about are the ways in which exploitation all operates in the context of women's sport. And that the women who are elite athletes, professional athletes are subjected to working conditions that are really quite different than a lot of their peers in men's sport. And then that has, of course, a very detrimental impact on their performance and their experiences more generally. But before I kind of, we kind of come around to that, I think inextricable from the question of fandom and the market is the issue of revenue, right? And I want to talk here first a little bit about, because we're all interested here in U.S. college sports. And I think the U.S. college sports in the American context are a big part of the conversation about women's sports as a political economy in general. Now, one question I have is, are women's college sports revenue sports? Currently, because there's a lot of conversation about revenue sports and non-revenue are now kind of rebranded as Olympic sports. So my question is partly, are women's college sports revenue sports and should they be? Are they a drain on athletic departments, as so many athletic directors contend they are, in making the case for why they cannot afford to pay some men, such as football players, right? Because we know that in the larger conversation about the kind of reshaping and reformulation of football and other aspects of the NCA right now, whenever the conversation is introduced, that maybe there's going to be collective bargaining, compensation of players in some form other than what we've seen in the past, we constantly hear this line, well, then we're going to have to cut other sports. Then we can't afford to have other sports. How do we satisfy Title IX, et cetera? And a built-in assumption of that, obviously, necessarily, is that women's sports can't pay for themselves, which is to say they don't produce revenue, right? So if any money is spent on women's sports, it has to come from somewhere else because it can't actually support itself. Is that even a fair premise to start with? No. No, it is not. All right, so let's go through what the data seems to say. So the Department of Education gathers all the data on revenue and expenses from every college sports team at every college in the country, and they've tracked this data for about 20 years. And what's interesting about the data is if you look at it and you plot it, it follows women's college basketball revenue and men's college basketball revenue, both follow a very consistent time trend across those 20 years, it increases, except for COVID, it was increasing every year at a very consistent trend. If you plot the trend, extrapolate backwards in time, and you look at where it was likely that revenue was at for women in the mid 1990s, about five or six, seven years before the data is officially tracked. That number that you get for women's college basketball revenue is, if you plot the men back to the mid 90s, the number you get for the men in the mid 90s is very similar to the number that you see for women right now, which means that women's college basketball in revenue today, despite the fact the NCAA is terrible at negotiating its broadcasting deal and it remains terrible at that. Like that, women's revenue today is similar to the men's revenue in the mid 90s. And if you go back further and you just look at and you read about what were the television deals, what was going on in men's college basketball back in the 80s and 70s, it's pretty clear that women today in revenue are bigger than what it was at that time. Now, if you go back to the media coverage of men's college basketball in the 70s, 80s and 70s, very clear, people thought of it at that point in time that these were revenue producing sports, these were sports that attracted an audience. That was all well understood. So if you thought that when Michael Jordan played college basketball or when the Fab5 played college basketball, that men's college basketball was a big deal, then you have to include that women's college basketball is a big deal today. And so women's college basketball definitely generates revenue. It is also the case that if you look at other women's sports like softball or gymnastics or soccer, it's pretty clear there's a television audience for that. There's pretty clear that there is in-person audience for those things. We're going to right now go through the women's softball tournament that's starting today. That you can see that when you look at the crowd, you can see that when you look at the television. There is an audience for this, they do produce revenue. So what has happened for years, and this goes back, as all the way back to Title IX, is that men have advanced an argument that the men have to subsidize the women that football subsidizes the other sports. That is really not, that is not entirely true at all, and it's certainly not true now. I think it's important to note this about college sports. This is often left out of the discourse when journalist talk about these things. The budget for a major university, if you take something like Ohio State, is something like, I don't know, $7 billion. The budget for their athletic program is something like $100, $200 million. The athletics are a very tiny part of the overall institution. The idea that football is needed to subsidize this, even if it was true that these programs generated no revenue, universities definitely have the money to provide these things. Also, according to their own arguments, their argument is the reason why they even have these programs as they advance the academic mission of the university. That's what they claim, right? And if that were true, well, then you would fund that just out of your general funding anyways. It just isn't true that the men have to subsidize the women today. That's not true. There is revenue. I would argue it was never true. This would have been funded out of just a general budget at all, so that's how it would have been done anyways. Typically, the football money just gets funneled back into the football program. I think Rod Fort and Jason Winfrey wrote a book about this about 15, 20 years ago. And they pointed out that if even if you just look at the surplus that the men's programs claim they were generating going back in the data, they said, there isn't enough of the surplus to fund these other programs. You're not creating a surplus big enough to be doing that. So that clearly isn't what you're doing. You're not doing that. You're not subsidizing other programs. So that's not in the day at all. Yeah, that's great. And I mean, you've smashed those arguments as I knew and hoped that you would. And I just want to honestly add a little bit more to underline some of the points you're making. Because there's so much to say. And remember, my original question was, you know, are women sports potentially revenue generating sports? Is there a, that's what we're talking about? Is there a market? Is there popularity? And I mean, the answer is such a resounding yes. I want to give it a little bit more data here. One thing that people may not have noted was that this past year, August 30th, 2023 at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, 92,000 people filled that football stadium to watch a volleyball game, right? A women's volleyball game. And just to be clear, right, like I've watched women's volleyball games at Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke. It's awesome. Amazing environment. All intimate little stadium, just tailor-made for volleyball, but a giant football stadium like Nebraska is a horrendous environment to watch a volleyball game. And yet people came out to watch because of that level of enthusiasm. We also know a couple of years ago that the women's volleyball final on TV when it aired out drew the MLS final. That's men's soccer, right? Men's professional soccer, which you have pointed out has received a tremendous amount of investment, even though it hasn't turned over very much profit, right? And the women's volleyball final, which, as you pointed out, the NCAA essentially gave away, right? The TV rights deal is a huge part of this story because the NCAA is essentially given away all of its women's sports to ESPN for a tiny fraction of their value, along with the deal for women's basketball, which was seen as like, you know, slightly marketable or slightly valuable, and then just everything went along with it. And so they're not actually recouping any of the value they could, but when you think about 92,000 people coming to a stadium to watch a horrible to witness, just because the scale doesn't work for volleyball game, right? It tells you how much enthusiasm is there, and that isn't even taking into account the absolutely outrageous numbers produced in the NCAA women's March Madness basketball tournament this year. And we'll come back around there, but the numbers are unreal. This year's final between South Carolina and the University of Iowa averaged 18.7 million viewers and peaked at 24 million viewers. The men's final, right? And you just pointed out to us the numbers in women's basketball look like the 90s in men's basketball. So the assumption built in there, and you're just reading the numbers, but of course the assumption is generally speaking, there's much more of a market for men's basketball right now. But yet the final of the men's tournament this year achieved only an average of 14.82 million, right? So that's 4 million less than the average achieved by the women's final. So the women's final was the much more popular event this year already, right? And this is all just to say, it is abundantly clear that NCAA women's sport right now has it. And as you pointed out, the NCAA didn't capture any of that values. So I think that's an astounding story is that. So when we talk about this in the book, during COVID, they do the bubble, men get a bubble, women get a bubble for their tournament, and there's this big weight room gap controversy that comes up. And so they point out, hey, the men get this giant weight room, third teams, women get a rack of dumbbells, and that was the entire weight room. It was a rack of dumbbells. And so there's this controversy. And so the NCAA launches an investigation. This law firm is hired, they investigate NCAA sports, and they point out that there is systematic gender discrimination, and they zero in on the television deal. And they say, look, you sold all the rights to the women's events as if there's no value in these. You sold all of them for something around $30 million, the men's are a billion. If you looked at the ratings, they hired a consultant. They said, the women's basketball alone is worth between 80 to 120 million. And so the answer is, oh, that's terrible. We dropped the balls the way they phrased it. As if it was an accident, whoops, we discriminated against, that was totally accidental. They then renegotiate for the women after all this happened. They only negotiate with one television network, ESPN, as the article detailing the deal emphasized. The deal was done very rapidly. So they only talked to one entity, done very rapidly, and they come up with a deal that says, the women will go from getting effectively in basketball, one million per year to 65 million. And he said, yeah, that's still less than what the consultant said, oh, you know, the consultant's wrong. You know, it's not quite as worth as much as that consultant thought. It's 65 million is a good deal. And then you look at the numbers, you're like, but what about volleyball? What about soccer? What about soccer? What about all the other women's sports? You're still putting them at a million. Are you saying that there's been no change in value? That seems ridiculous. So they, again, they totally blow the deal. And then a few months after they negotiate the 65 million for the women, the women end up with much higher ratings in their final than the men. And you're looking at it going, but the men got a billion and you only got 65. So you were off by, you know, more than a factor of 10 there, right? So you're, you're way off. And you just did this after you were called out on it. This was the best you could do when you felt bad about what you were doing. And it's still very pathetic. So this systematic behavior among men in sports, it just keeps, it's over and over again. They keep doing things like this where you call them out. You point out, look, your behavior is discriminatory, your behavior is sexist. You're not trying very hard on behalf of women. You try much harder when it comes to men. You're much more emotionally attached to the men than you are to the women. Then they make, they make some kind of statement, we feel bad, we'll try harder, and then they just go back to doing what they were doing before. And I think ultimately comes down to the fact that the men in charge, the men who are making the decisions, their attitudes are not changing in the slightest. I would argue that the men in charge who are making these deals at the NCAA probably spend very little time of their lives thinking about women's sports, that they spend most of their time thinking about men's sports. If you could do a survey, a study, and ask them, track during the day, how often are you thinking about men? How often are you thinking about women? Your job is to represent both. How much time do you just spend thinking about it? I think the answer would be 90% of the time I'm thinking about the men. I think about men's basketball, I think about men's football, I think about men, and how do you think about the women? Do you think about the men? I think that's what's going on there. And I think that explains the outcome number. So let's turn our attention a little bit to the professional level. And particularly the WNBA, but also I'd like to note that like other pro leagues like the recently formed PWHL and the women's super league are absolutely flourishing. Why is this or does this seem to be a moment of explosive popularity in women's sport? It can't just be about Caitlin Clark. It can't just be the fact that she's that good. Why is this a moment of such an example? I think to answer that question, you have to have an understanding of the history of men's sports. I think the problem is when you look at somebody like Adam Silver, who is the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver becomes commissioner of the NBA inherits a job from David Stern and the league that he inherited was a mature league, a league that had been around for 60, 70 years. And it was already worth building as a dollars. And the sense you get from his behavior and his attitudes and the attitudes of other people in the NBA and also among NBA fans is that it was always like this. That if you go back in time, it was always the case there were huge crowds from men's basketball that everybody was paying attention to Wil Chamberlain and Bill Russell and Bob Koozy and Elgin Baylor. They all had the same kind of fan bases like LeBron James has. And when you go back and you look at the data, you realize that that is totally not true. That the NBA started with very, very few fans. They were averaging about 3,000 fans a game to start. The revenue in the dub and the NBA, we know this from congressional testimony. The revenue in the mid 1950s in the NBA was about 10% in real terms, adjusted for inflation, about 10% the size of the WNBA revenue today. So it's a really itsy bitty tiny little league. And then as time goes by, that fan base gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And you see that same continual pattern growth and attendance when you look at data for Major League Baseball or data for the National Football League. It's this gradual building of a fan base. And so women, Title IX is passed in 1972. So prior to that, you really can't have very big fan bases for college women's fast sports and you can't really have professional sports because there's no pool of talent. This is not being supported. And so women sports in the United States basically begins about 50 years ago. So it's not surprising that 50 years later, you start to see the same kind of explosion in the fan bases that you saw in the men after four or five decades. It followed exactly the same pattern. And you're asking, this is the thing about fandom, we talk about this in the book. fandom is you're asking people to make an emotional commitment to something that doesn't actually exist. It's not a real thing. There's no such thing as a Boston Celtic. And so what you want the consumer to do is not, is they're they're going to spend money on the Boston Celtics. They're going to buy jerseys. They're going to buy tickets. They're going to spend time, they have to be willing to sit in front of a television or sit in front of a screen and watch the games. So it's a commitment of money, it's commitment of time. And you can only get that from the consumer if there's some sort of emotional connection. You've got to get them to a point where they're emotionally involved in what's going on. For that to happen, these fans have to make an investment of time to understand what they're looking at. It helps tremendously to have other fans around them who are making the same kind of commitment. And when your league begins, you got very few people who are doing that. It's just they're just not doing that. And so your fan base is really, really small. As the league continues to exist and persist, the fans, the networking between the fans allows other fans to come in and the fan base grows and grows and grows and grows and grows until it becomes this mature league. Women's sports haven't had enough time to get to that point. We're starting to see it though with the WNBA now that the fan bases are getting there. And so, but it takes time. And what we've seen historically when it comes to women's sports, when we look at the history of failures in women's sports, where we've had numerous soccer leagues fail, we've had numerous basketball leagues fail, we've had numerous softball leagues fail. That the investors gave it, they'll give it five, ten years, fan base doesn't appear they give up. And you're like, okay, that's not how the men's sports develop. You got to be patient with that. And so, I think the moment we're in right now is just simply reflecting the fact that this is exactly where you'd expect, given where you started. Women started later than men, and it's important to emphasize why they started later than men. Men discriminated against women. The reason why women have less revenue and less fans than men is always about the discrimination. It was a discrimination that drove the story. It's not about the nature of the product, it's about the fact that men actively banned the women's sports when they allowed women to play, they didn't fund them, they didn't support them. And it's important to note, again, it's men who are making these decisions, men are the ones who are the decision makers here. And so, the story of women's sports is wrapped up in gender discrimination, and that's a big part of the story. Yeah, okay, that's extremely clear from everything you've been laying out. But now what I want to turn to is really the thing that is my primary focus on this whole conversation, and the thing that I think everything we've been talking about so far, it may not get enough discussion, but it's certainly something that if anyone is paying attention to any related issues in women's sports, these are the sorts of things that have been crossing your radar in the last couple of years. But the thing that I think is completely vastly under-disgust, and I probably know this because I was teaching the labor of sport course for a number of years, and I wanted to have literature on this subject, and it was not easy to find scholarly literature dealing in this area, was the question of working conditions and exploitation in the context of women's sport. Although we are seeing tremendous growth in popularity, the associated and vital question that comes with that is whether the athletic workers, the players who produce the commodity spectacle, and that is any value that exists in this sphere, they are the ones responsible for it, are they enjoying the fruits of that labor? Are women professional athletes compensated fairly, or are they exploited? And how does their compensation and/or exploitation compare to men's professional athletes and why? Well, we also talked about that in the book, so that is part of the story. So, when it comes to WNBA, this comes up a lot, WNBA players, this actually came up with Katelyn Clark. Katelyn Clark is being paid $70,000 roughly to play in WNBA. People have noted that is a ridiculous salary for an elite athlete, and then when the trolls are asked about that, they are like, "Well, there is no market for this, it is just economics, and you have to generate revenue." And you actually even hear the WNBA say things like that, you know, as the revenue gets bigger, we will pay the players better. When I have gone through the data, and I have written about this for years, and I wrote about it at Forbes, I wrote about it at Vice Sports, I have noted this in my Sports E-Context book, that if you go through and you look at the revenue data for the WNBA, and I did this at Forbes, I went through it in 2017, or so, I said, "Well, I don't have the actual revenue data because it is not reported, but I do know what the television deal is, and I know what the attendance is, and I know what minimum ticket prices are." So I know there is at least 50 million in revenue, and I know there is other revenue sources. So I contacted some people, affiliated with the WNBA, and asked them about some numbers, and it was kind of, it was a really odd little investigation. I don't know if you have ever seen the movie, this is an old movie, this is from 50 years ago, the movie, "All the Presidents Men," where there's a scene in that movie where Bob Woodward and Karl Bernstein are investigating Watergate, and they're trying to pin down a piece of the story, and they're talking to one of their sources, and Karl Bernstein calls up this one source, and he says, "I'm trying to get this information pinned down." The guy says, "I can't be the source for you." He said, "I know that, I know you can't be. Why don't we do it this way? I'm going to count back from 10, and if you're still on the line when I get to zero, I'm going to take that as a sign that what I'm saying is accurate." Well that work, and he does that, and the guy stays on the line, and he says, "Are we good? He goes, "I'm good." So then they run with the story. And my investigation of the WNBA revenue was kind of like that. I would talk to people on the WNBA, I would say, "Would you be uncomfortable if I said in a Forbes publication that revenue is $60 million per year?" And they would say, "I can't confirm the number, but I would be comfortable with that. That sounds okay." And I said, "This feels very much like that movie." So I went with that number, and I said, "I know that the salaries are 12 million, so it's their pay 20%, the WNBA employers are paid 20%, and NBA players are paid 50% of passcode related income." So that's the exploitation women are paid much less than the men. And the NBA owns, they own as much of the WNBA as the owner. So the split is the NBA, they actually sold some shares to some people, but if we ignore that, the NBA owns half of the WNBA owns the others, owners on the other half. And one of the executives on one of the WNBA teams told me, "Put it this way to me. If the 12 WNBA owners make a decision that they want to do something, and the NBA says no, then the answer is no. That the NBA calls the shots." So the $10 billion revenue NBA calls the shots on the WNBA. So whatever happens in the WNBA is ultimately the NBA's decision. So when we say, "Why are the WNBA players paid so little?" It's because the NBA wants it that way. They're the ones deciding these things. And so why are the WNBA players going to go back to working conditions? Why were they not given charter flights for years? The argument that the WNBA would make is, "Well, we don't have the money for that." And I would say, "Well, you're not paying the players, and you're not paying the coaches. So what are you doing with the money? Why wouldn't you build a four charter flights? Universities fly athletes around on charter flights. Why can't you do the same thing?" Especially given that fact that you're a partner with somebody that is $10 billion in revenue. I mean, that's that you clearly can afford this. You're choosing not to do this. So the salary level of the WNBA, the charter flights, are all choices that are being made. And it turned out when I did that investigation of the $60 million, I was wrong. Bloomberg wrote an article a year ago, and in that article, a WNBA person told a Bloomberg reporter that in 2019, right after I was writing about this at Forbes, revenue was $100 million. So I was actually off by quite a bit. And that today, revenue was $200 million in double the last five years. The players are now paid, not $12 million, they're paid about $20 million. So they get about 10% of the revenue right now. So these women are heavily exploited. And they're exploited because, again, this is what the NBA chooses to do. They choose to treat the women this way. Yes. Thank you so much for that. And I want to say a couple things. One, that I was pointing out that there was such a dearth of literature on the subject, but actually your work, your work in Forbes, was really one of the only examples of people digging into this exact question. So I'm very aware that you have been long covering the story, which is one reason we really want to be talking to you about it right now. And I just, I really feel like I have to underline for people here what you're saying because it's so fundamental, whether or not, like we can just leave everything aside, whether or not, the amount of value being produced, and you've explained at great length all the complex factors for how much value is produced and why, right? But whether or not the value is bigger or smaller, that percentage figure that you're talking about, it is really, that's the rate of exploitation essentially that is happening in this enterprise. And if WMBA players are making 10% of the revenue, and MBA players are making 50% of the revenue, right? That is a vast difference in the degree of exploitation that is occurring. And so I think it's just, it's not possible to debate this question that we see in women's professional sport, a fundamental form of exploitation, and that even as we may celebrate the increase in popularity of women's sport and champion it, we have to simultaneously be challenging the sites of women's sports labor to treat their workers more justly, more fairly, and in a far less exploitative fashion. Because as the WMBA bursts in popularity, I do not want to see that money going to the capitalist class of the sport. I want it going to the athletes who are producing the value and producing the amazing basketball that is so exciting to people. And the other thing that we got to say about this is, and we've had athletes who have been on the show before, like Liz Knox, the hockey professional hockey player who have talked about this. But when you vastly underpay women athletes, and also like you said, David, when you give women athletes worse working conditions, like whether it's the flights, the fact they're sitting in airports right overnight because they're flight out to late because they're not on a charter flight, and then they still have to play in the game, right? All those factors when it comes to working conditions and compensation also have an impact on performance, right? And yet we're always going to be judging women's performance against men, men who have the best working conditions possible in the world of professional sport, let's say the NBA, right? If you don't have the compensation that allows you to focus on your craft, and that is so true at so many levels of women's professional sport, that was the problem with women's professional hockey, for instance, that players were basically paid nothing, so they had to work other full-time jobs, how are you working on your craft? And for the thing about WMBA players, these are athletes who had to play in Russia, for instance, in their off season, in order to accrue a full salary and look what happened to Brittany Griner as a consequence of that, right? That is directly related, that experience in Russia is directly related to this exploitation question because of players were getting the compensation only that they deserve, but that they aren't, that exist, like the value exists because of them and them alone, right? If they were getting that value, they wouldn't have to go to these extreme lengths and they'd be able to focus more on honing their craft as well. And it goes beyond the charter issue, Kalea Cooper made this point. She went from the sky to the Phoenix Mercury, and she made this point in a press conference a few days ago that, well, one of the great things about the Mercury is they provide food before and after practice, and that leaves the question. So the sky were not feeding you, I mean, you weren't giving them food. Candace Parker made this point when she went from the sky to the aces, that when she got to the aces, this is the first time in her life she had ever, she had ever had a locker of her own, and you're, how can an athlete not have their own locker, how is that possible? The sky didn't have their own dedicated practice facility. They were practicing it. I think they were practicing it like an adult rec center. So there'd be like, you know, people at the rec center while the sky were practicing. That's what they used. And that's the level of investment the owner was willing to make in this WNBA team was not willing to provide a dedicated practice facility, not willing to provide food. And so these are the conditions that the women face. I want to sort of talk, we were talking about exploitation of athletes, and you made the point that you didn't want the owner stand up with it. I do think that we should understand that in the overall economy, this is what the research says, in the overall economy, labor share of income in the US over the last century has gone from 70% to 60%. So there's been a decline as workers have less bargaining power, unions are weaker, taxes are more favorable for the wealthy. And so we've seen that somehow in sports, people have got this idea that a 50/50 split makes the most sense. So the NBA doesn't quite do a 50/50 split. It's basketball related income. The NBA has restricted some income as not basketball related income. And basically it's half the sweet money they take off the top. So luxury suites half that money goes to the NBA before they do an exploding. So the player is only 25% of the sweet money because I guess the argument is if you're in a luxury suite, you're only watching half the time anyway. So maybe that's the story. I don't know. But the NBA has a story there. And so the men's players, the men on the men's side, whether you look at Major League Baseball or National Football League or the NBA appear to be undervalued, they're not paid exactly what you'd expect them to be paid. The women are exploited just increasingly more. I think the best we could hope for is the women eventually get to the point where they're exploited as much as the men are exploited. I don't think we're going to get to a point where the athletes are actually paid as if they were workers in the other industry. Labor markets and sports have a lot of institutions that do not exist anywhere else that were created by owners to make it so that they would generate more revenue for themselves. And so that's just the nature of sports in general. And I know Johan has a question here, so I'm going to turn it to her in a second. But I just want to say, I love that you just corrected me to say that actually athletes are more exploited in sport than I was allowing because in terms of my general project, I could not be more supportive of that intervention. So thank you for correcting me to point out that actually the men's athletes are also being exploited even at the current figure. Yeah, that was really, really fascinating. And I do have this question, but I was also thinking about Nathan, what you said, what you pointed out about how basically the extreme exploitation that exists in U.S. capitalist sport is essentially what begets off of fascist authoritarianism abroad and obviously at home, right that the fact that athletes are so highly racially gender-wise exploited in the U.S. that they have to resort to go to a place like Russia where they can actually, they can be paid further labor and now we see what happened with Brittany Griner. I think it's really, really important to talk about. It's something that I deal with in my research, although my research deals with authoritarianism in terms of communism and state socialism, but I still think when we're thinking his historically and currently about what athletes are basically forced to do with their labor and with their bodies when they are exploited under capitalism to such an extreme level, they will be forced to either endure and/or search for other opportunities elsewhere. And so I think, and then that is what leaves them obvious, this may seem really obvious, but I just want to make it clear, right, that's what forces them to search for really potentially horrific opportunities elsewhere that can endanger them, which is a remote we sell with Brittany Griner. But the other thing is that there are many, many, we know about Brittany Griner because of the ultimate decisions, like the ultimate things that happened, but there are so many other stories of female athletes going, being forced to go abroad and kind of what happens to them when they're abroad that we don't actually know about because they haven't quite exploded on the same kind of international diplomatic level that it did with Brittany Griner. So that may seem like an isolated case to people, but there are just so many stories we don't know about. And I think it's this extreme exploitation that also obviously leads athletes to accept things like, you know, extreme racism online and from their coaches and from their, you know, their players and their trainers and things like that. Obviously, sexual abuse and harassment, right? So I think it's, you know, this umbrella of this extreme exploitation is what forces, essentially forces athletes to endure these really horrific experiences or else they have to quit. So it seems like really, really obvious, but just kind of wanted to expand on that. But I'm going to do this sort of awkward shift to this question that I've been wanting to ask, which is, we see athletes that are starting to be benefiting from this, like, surge of interest around women's sport. But there are still major questions about who exactly is being marketed. Some great sports journalists that we really appreciate have been writing about this, for example, Katie Barnes wrote for ESPN about how even though 78% of WNBA players are racialized, only 40% of top 10 Jersey sales belong to black players. And also of the three players who had signature shoes, all of them are white. Now this has been changing with Nike's new deal for Asia Wilson. It was also recently announced that Reebok is doing a show with Angel Rees. And also one of our other favorite creditors for our journalists, Frankie Dila Kretow, pointed out that the WNBA also has a new marketing deal with underwear producer skims of Kim Kardashian. But in that marketing campaign, there was no masculine gender expressing players. These issues also are impacted in the context of name, image, likeness, or NIL in college sport. So with all of this in mind, how do race, gender, and sexuality influence the political economy of women's sport? Well, that's quite a question. It is the case that when we think about the salary issue and the charter flight issue in the WNBA, that these were issues that existed for quite a long time, I actually put it this way to a reporter a couple weeks ago. I was talking to a reporter and when you're talking to a journalist, a writer, a newspaper writer, or a media writer, that typically an interview will last, you know, you'll talk for an hour or so as you talk about a subject and they're working on the story. And so in the course of the conversation, I said, you know, one of the things about sports is that stories get told more than once. The story gets told initially by the journalist covering the event as it happens. And then eventually it's told by historians looking back and then they recount the story. And I said, I said, someday in the future, the WNBA is going to be a multi-billion dollar entity. So revenue right now is 200 million, very similar to what NBA revenue was at the same point in its history, even after you adjust for inflation, team revenue is very similar. So WNBA is right where the NBA was in the mid 1970s. And but eventually given the growth path, it will be a multi-billion dollar international entity. And people write stories about today, about what was going on right now. And the story they'll tell is, I'm going to tell you that I said, I'm waiting to imagine 30 years now, thinking about race and gender and sexual orientation. And I said, they're going to tell a story that goes something like this. They'll say, I'm going to tell you the story. It's going to be completely unbelievable when I tell you this. But once upon a time, there was this woman and she was a large African-American woman. She was a lesbian and but she was one of the very best players in the league, top player in the league. But because wages were so low, she had to accept a job in Russia. And as a result of that, this woman ended up in a prison camp, unbelievable that a top athlete would end up in a Russian prison camp. But this actually happened. And then when that player came back, you would think, well, the league, you ended up there because we didn't pay you very well. We're going to have to fix that. I mean, we don't want our players in prison camps. So we're going to fix that, right? No, they did nothing. They did nothing. They didn't fix anything. They didn't fix the pay. They didn't fix the charter flights. They fixed nothing. And then after the Russian prison camp episode, very soon after that, this white woman from Iowa shows up in the league and they asked the white woman from Iowa about the idea that she would have to go from charter flights at Iowa, at the University of Iowa to commercial flights in the WNBA and she pointed out that would be an adjustment for her. And within days of that interview, the WNBA announced, we're going to do charter flights for everybody. And so you're like, wait a minute, you mean the woman in Russia that didn't lead you to change your attitude, but the white girl from Iowa, now you got a new policy within a day? How is that? And I think this is something that we see in sports. And it goes back to the, we talk about this in the book. The women's basketball league that existed in the late 70s for three years, the 76 Olympics happen, women's college basketball, a women's Olympic basketball does really well at those games. They sit there and they go, there's a market for women's basketball or sort of women's basketball league. 1978, they launched this league. And again, they went and got a woman from Iowa, Molly Bowen was her name. And Molly Bowen has a really interesting story that she had played, Iowa didn't have five on five women's high school basketball, they had six on six. Molly Bowen played six on six basketball in Iowa and what that meant is the way it was set up is three players would play on offense and three players play on defense and nobody crosses the center line. So they don't cross the half court line. And so Molly Bowen only played offense in high school. She went to college, they taught her how to play defense because she had never done it before. And then she ends up in this women's professional league and she becomes their leading score. She shoots all the time. And she also happened to look like Farrah Fawcett. She becomes the face of the league. There's other players in the league who are African-American, who are better players, but they don't get the same attention. So this has been something that has been plaguing women's sports for a long time in that the attention that tends to go to the athletes tends to go towards the white woman, not towards the African-American. And this is something the leagues have consistently struggled with. And they really don't seem to have any kind of solution for that, right? They don't seem to be very good at finding a solution for this. But it is something that is persistently true that we find this throughout the history of certainly with women's basketball, you see this over and over again. Yeah, no, those are great points. And I just wanted to add a couple of things to them, just small, small additions, but this is for one thing, this is exactly why, and we don't have to get into this because obviously we get a whole conversation about this. So don't worry, I'm not asking you to get into this, but name image and likeness as a source of compensation in the context of college sport is problematic for a lot of reasons as we have talked about at great length. But one reason why it is so problematic to be paid for your marketing potential, your promotional ability as opposed to for the actual athletic labor that you're doing in the course of your sport is that all of these factors with respect to gender, but also race and sexuality come into play in terms of who is most marketable in the context of a profoundly white supremacist and heterosexist society, right? In the context of society like that, of course a particular type of woman is going to be the most marketable and they are going to receive the most revenue, right? And so that's no way whatsoever to to compensate our athletes if we want to be concerned about any of these issues around equity. So that's one thing and it just builds on what you're saying. And the other thing that's also building on exactly what you were saying is just this morning and we'll be releasing the podcast next week. So this will be just a few days out of date, but not much. Just this very morning we woke up to the news that in Louisville, Kentucky, the number one golfer in the world, a very white man by the name of Scott Sheffler was actually arrested by the Louisville police department and he was subjected to some fairly rough treatment which again, was probably mitigated by his racial and gender status, but nonetheless was certainly not a treat for him this morning. He was en route to compete in the second round of the PGA championship. He is trying to perform a feat of winning every one of the major golf tournaments this year. He won the Masters already. He is the most famous golfer in the world right now. And he was arrested on the way to do his golf work. So far, this has a lot of analogous qualities to the Brittany Griner story, but much in line with exactly what you were saying, Scotty Sheffler ended up being able to play golf this morning. He was back at the Valhalla golf club within a couple of hours because everything got straightened out, everything got sorted out and he was able to go to work. And it would be I think ridiculous for us not to think about gender, race and so forth as factors in the way he was treated and how different the experience is for the other athletes like Brittany Griner that we've been speaking about. Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly. It is the case that there are these significant disparities. And this is this gets at the issue of race and gender in general in society that and as a white male, I point this out to my students when I teach gender economics that what ends up happening when we think about race and gender is it's not that it's often not the case that we impose different rules on non-white males. It's the case that we actually impose the exact rules on non-white males. So Brittany Griner is arrested in Russia and one of the arguments people made is, well, technically she broke the law, right, technically she broke the law. The question is if she were white and a male and that happened, would she have ended up in a Russian prison camp for breaking the law? We tend to impose the exact penalty on non-white males and then white males, what you tend to see happen is they break the rules and somebody says, well, you know, there's mitigating circumstances. They're not really a bad person and somehow they get out of the actual punishment for what they do. So it's not that the women and non-white males face different rules. It's that the rules are imposed upon them exactly. And for white males, it's not exactly the same experience. They are given a pass. And this goes, you know, as college instructors we see this, women get evaluated in the classroom on very exacting standards by their students. And not on the other hand, you know, it's very rare, certainly in my career and I've been teaching for about 30 years, it's very rare that I have anyone ever questioned whether or not I am qualified to teach the subject. Even though I've taught 18 different subjects in economics and I think it would have been reasonable for any student to ask, certainly when I started teaching gender economics, are you actually qualified to teach this? Is this really what you should be doing? But no one ever asked me that question, no one ever suggested that, no, you're not. So the rules get very bendy when it comes to white males and they don't get as bendy when it comes to other groups. And that is where I think you see the discrimination story come out. Yeah. And I think just one thing to kind of add to that is that it's not 100% clear if like drugs were planted and whether she broke the rules or not. And then of course, is the whole issue of like, should these rules even exist, right? But that's kind of I think another question as well. But I think we will head to the last question because we've already taken up so much of your time and you've been very generous in answering our questions and kind of helping us think through some of these big, these big issues. So we're wondering, given everything that we've talked about, what future do you predict for women's sport? And what do you think might be some of the pathways for us to achieve greater equity? Well, my prediction for the future of women's sports is a very optimistic prediction. I think as we go through this century, what we're going to see is women's sports are going to continue to explode. The audience is going to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I think women's sports, both at the college and professional level will increasingly look like men's sports. The athletes will become as famous as the male athletes. That's what I see as if you just look at the trend and the data and you project forward. I don't see any reason to think that that wouldn't happen. I think there definitely is an audience for women's sports. I think that's already been established that clearly is true. It's certainly true at the national level. It's important to understand why it exists at the national level. At the national level, people already know their rooting interests. They know whether they're rooting for Team USA or Team Canada or Team Sweden. And so they know they're rooting interests and so you're just watching the women compete for the country and you find that the audience is willing to watch the women compete for the country just as much as they're willing to watch the men compete for the country. So you see that there is an audience. So the future of women's sports in terms of audience, in terms of revenue, very much like the men's sports. I think as people look back on this time period and before that, I think it'll be harder and harder for people who are born after this time period. People who are born in the 2030s or 2040s who grow up in the latter part of this century. They're going to have a hard time believing that women were ever treated like this. That this was ever actually what was going on. The Brittany Griner story will seem an unbelievable story that that actually happened. That's my expectation, is that that that's where women's sports is ultimately going. And so I tend to be optimistic about this. I think that's the trend. It's not the case that gender discrimination is going to vanish. It's not the case, that's not going to happen. But it is the case that the idea that somebody would actually utter the statement, nobody watches women's sports, that's going to be something that people are going to say, that can't be right. That doesn't make any sense. Why would you think that? Clearly they do. That will become increasing. So as someone who is a pessimist, I know that we need people that are more optimistic than I am. And I think we need hope to resist and survive. So I really appreciate your optimistic kind of perspective on where gender equity in sport amends women's sports, things like that, kind of where they might be going. So David, thank you so much for joining us today. It has really, it's been really great to hear about this fantastic work that you and Dr. Nefertiti Walker have done with this book. And I think also again, kind of helping us understand the political economy from sport and analyzing it, not just from a gender perspective, but also we talked about racialization and sexuality and things like that. So thank you so much for joining us this morning. This was fun. I like having, you know, talking about this is a lot of fun. This is a, this is a very important topic, but it's a fun topic and it's interesting. It talks, I think sports, I think people underestimate this, certainly in academic circles, I underestimate this. The, the, what sports allows us to do in discussing very, very big issues in a way that is engaging and interesting and also talks about things more definitively than you can do in areas where you don't have, you know, the same kind of data and same kind of resources that we have in sports. It's fun. It was fun talking to you all about this.