The price gap between men's and women's basketball tickets is madness

There is nothing wrong with family programming. But before we assign a Disney Channel to women's basketball, consider the limits of this agenda. For years, women's sports have been marketed, scheduled, and priced as Saturday afternoon birthday party fare (bring 20 and it's $2 each) rather than a top-shelf Saturday night event-worthy adult social gathering (who has those courtside seats?).

And yet, if you actually watch the women's competition you will see a game you didn't see a decade ago, a game with thrilling up-tempo play, lots of scoring, three-pointers, and acrobatic passes. Isn't that why we watch basketball?

Charging less to watch women devalues their play and perpetuates stereotypical economic disparities between men and women. A 2004 study in the behavioral science journal Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, showed that when tickets to women's sports events cost more than to men's events, test subjects "perceived the women's teams as equivalent in value to the men's teams." In other words, men get a status bump just because they're men. Unequal ticket prices underscore this – and often on the public dime.

Many of the nation's top basketball teams are at public institutions. Thanks to an explosive press conference, we all know that University of Connecticut Men's Basketball Coach Jim Calhoun is that state's highest-paid public employee. What makes his yammering about how much money his team brings in – $7.3 million to the women's $5.3 million – so frustrating is that the women's team is just as compelling and successful.

Last year, average per game attendance for the UConn women was 10,479 to the men's 11,887. But tickets to see the women cost $22 while tickets to see the men cost $30 (wonder what multiplying that over a season and thousands of fans does to the revenue gap between the teams?). So why charge 25 percent less to watch the women?

"Tradition and history dictate the cost of the ticket," explained UConn athletics spokesman Mike Enright. "Historically the women's tickets have always been a little less expensive than the men's tickets."

OK, so help me understand why. "It's really a factor of, like I said, history and tradition – and not that the women's team doesn't have a great history and tradition – but the history of ticket pricing."

Exactly the problem.

Laura Pappano is writer-in-residence at The Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College and blogger at FairGameNews.com. A full report by Pappano and WCW methodologist Allison J. Tracy, PhD., will be available this spring.

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