LIKE MOST of the University, I've spent the better part of the past two weeks watching college basketball. But while the NCAA men's basketball tournament gets top billing on CBS and ESPN, the women's tournament is relegated to ESPN-2 and ESPN-U. The issue of differential coverage for men's and women's sports even affects the University: Letters to the editor have bemoaned The Cavalier Daily's poor coverage of women's swimming. This begs the question of the proper role of sports news outlets: give the people what they want or engage in social engineering?
Critics argue that University students do, in fact, want to read about women's sports and that this newspaper does its readers a disservice by ignoring their needs. They make the point that there is no way to know which stories readers most value. They are clearly right on that point, but that does not mean there are no ways to gauge what people want.
A great measure of what people want is how much they're willing to pay for it. If you'd like to watch the ladies of the Washington Mystics play basketball, court-side seats will run you just $115. If you'd like to watch the Wizards play Shaq and the Heat on Friday, court-side seats will run you $2500 -- more than 21 times higher. Unlike the NBA, seats to University basketball games are free, but they still require a significant opportunity cost of waiting online and then actually going to the game. In the 2007-2008 season, average attendance at home women's basketball games was 3,439 compared to 11,705 for men's. What people want to watch is men's sports.
But giving people what they want is not always a good idea. In his ground-breaking work on the economics of discrimination, Gary Becker identified three kinds of taste-based discrimination: employer, employee and customers. The best way to combat an anti-women bias by employers or coworkers is competitive markets. They might not like it, but in a competitive market, employers can't afford not to hire women, and employees can't afford not to work with women. The problem is discrimination by customers. Rather than decreasing sexism, markets will actually increase it by giving sexist customers what they want: services not provided by women.
Applying a Beckerian taxonomy to sports is easy: Employers are coaches, employees are teammates and customers are fans. Just as in labor markets, the competitive sports world effectively prevents discrimination by coaches and teammates. But if fans are sexist, then markets will give them what they want: men's sports, not women's sports. This opens the door to government-sponsored social engineering.
A major role of government in the United States is balancing the economy with fundamental societal values. Given that free market capitalism can very well lead to labor market discrimination against women (or any group) based on the tastes of customers, there is a clear mandate for government action. This came in the form of the 1963 Equal Pay Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Under federal law, it is illegal to discriminate against anyone on the basis of race or gender in the workplace. By strictly enforcing these laws, the government can end labor market discrimination.
In 1972, Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink tried bringing these insights to the world of college (and high school) sports with the Equal Opportunity in Education Act, usually referred to as simply Title IX. Unfortunately, it didn't work out quite so well. By forcing colleges to have men's and women's sports in levels proportional to the enrollment of men and women, Title IX has resulted in a significant decrease in non-major sports like archery and wrestling. JMU, for example, recently had to cut 10 varsity teams to bring itself into compliance. Rather than achieve gender equality by elevating women, Title IX tries to accomplish this by bringing down men.
The limits of social engineering bring me back to the issue of media coverage of women's sports. To some extent, I can't help being struck by the triviality of the issue: on what page an article should appear. Yet for many people deeply invested and interested in college sports, this is a truly meaningful issue.
The problem is that government intervention in sports funding has not helped women. Similarly, government-mandated equal coverage might push women's sports to the front page, but few people would read it. In the labor market, discrimination can mean the difference between being able to eat or starving. In sports, a leisure activity, favoring men's sports over women's sports, is not discrimination: it's a preference. Liking men's basketball more than women's is no different from opting for baseball over lacrosse.
Newspapers have an obligation to provide what their readers want and, speaking with their dollars and time, they have made clear that they want men's sports. Just as newspapers cover other less popular sports, coverage for women's sports is certainly due, but not front-page billing. In this case, give the people what they want.
Josh Levy's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at jlevy@cavalierdaily.com.
Read More
WILLIAMS: Donald Trump will be a threat to student loan forgiveness
By Ryan Williams | YesterdayTo be sure, this is not a problem of the University’s making. Nevertheless, understanding the uncertainty of financial accessibility in education, the University must step up to the plate.
PATEL: Personal development courses support students beyond the gradebook
By Heer Patel | 6 days agoThe University must rethink its approach to education beyond traditional major-specific requirements and mandate personal development courses.
EDITORIAL: Commercialization threatens U.Va.’s educational mission
By Editorial Board | 6 days agoAfter all, measuring the University’s worth in terms of accrued capital, operational efficiency and numerical rankings molds this space into just another cookie-cutter institution.
