Poll: About 3 in 10 US adults follow women’s sports

WASHINGTON When Meghan Sells heads to Providence Park to watch Oregons professional womens soccer team, she finds herself among a fairly mixed crowd groups of young women, dads bringing their children, youth players checking out the Thorns latest match.

The physicians assistant is a self-described lifelong sports fan and former softball player who will watch any sport.

That includes both collegiate and professional sports for women, putting Sells squarely in a fan base that suddenly has more options than ever before and is seen as fertile ground for teams and advertisers eager to ride the rising interest in the womens game.

About 3 in 10 US adults follow womens professional or college sports extremely, very or somewhat closely, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Thats lower than the share who follow mens sports by the same measurements about half but it also shows that Sells is far from alone.

As interest and investment in womens sports have picked up in recent years, so have the entry points for fans.

The meteoric rise of Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa phenom-turned-WNBA star, helped bring wider attention to womens basketball, and increased streaming availability, international success and name, image and likeness deals have elevated the value and viewership of womens sports.

Growing up, I feel like the only sports I was able to really see on TV were mens which is fine, I like mens sports, Sells said.

But I enjoy watching womens sports more.

...

I think the more that you see it on TV, the more youre going to have younger people interested in it.

The poll found that womens sports fans those who follow womens sports at least somewhat closely are different from mens sports fans.

Fans of womens sports, while not a majority-female group, are more gender balanced than mens sports fans.

Those who follow womens pro sports also are more casual in their fandom than mens pro sports fans, tending to say they attend or watch games occasionally rather than frequently.

People who follow mens sports, by contrast, are more likely to identify attachments to teams as opposed to players.

The survey was conducted just before the start of the 2025 WNBA season, an expansion year for the league.

Coming off a season in which attendance records were set (and reset ), the league will debut a new franchise the Golden State Valkyries and up the number of regular season games from 40 to 44.

In 2026, two additional teams will join the league, including one in Portland, Oregon.

Sells, whos been in the city for about a decade, said she is prepared to get season tickets.

Different fan bases Mens sports at both the collegiate and professional levels remain more popular than womens sports, the poll found.

About one-third of US adults said they watch, listen to or read about mens collegiate sports at least somewhat closely, and more than 4 in 10 say they follow mens pro sports.

By contrast, about 2 in 10 say they follow womens collegiate sports at least somewhat closely, and a similar share say they follow womens pro sports.

A greater share of men than women say they follow professional or collegiate sports overall, but the gender balance was more even among womens sports fans.

Around half of fans of womens sports are male, the survey found, compared with about two-thirds of fans of mens sports.

This could be in part due to the overlap between the fandoms: About 90% of US adults who follow womens sports at least somewhat closely also say the same about mens sports, though about half of people who follow mens sports said they also followed womens sports.

As womens sports increase in popularity and accessibility, a relatively large share are casual fans.

While close to 9 in 10 of both mens and womens pro sports fans say they frequently or occasionally watch, listen to or read about their respective professional sports, a higher percentage of womens sports fans say they are only occasional consumers.

That includes people like Matthew Behr, 58, a lifelong fan of the Green Bay Packers and Milwaukee Brewers in his home state of Wisconsin.

He doesnt watch a lot of basketball, he said, but when the sport crosses into news coverage, he will read up on it.

Thats how he started following Clark, whose final seasons at Iowa were credited with bringing new viewers to the sport and who now plays for the Indiana Fever.

I was seeing it on MSNBC, he said.

I dont watch a lot of basketball.

Its not a mens and womens thing.

If she was playing in a womens football league, Id probably watch that.

Attending games Mens sports with larger leagues, bigger TV deals and a more expansive media ecosystem have a more fervent audience.

About two-thirds of mens sports fans said they frequently or occasionally attend a professional sporting event in person, compared with roughly half of womens sports fans.

One possible reason womens sports fans arent showing up at sporting events is theyre less likely to be attached to a specific team.

Only about one-third of womens sports fans said the teams they support or follow are extremely or very important to why they follow the sport.

For mens fans, the figure was around 50%.

However, nearly identical shares of mens and womens sports fans said that certain athletes they support were at least very important to why they follow womens sports.

Bernard Seltzer, a high school administrator and math and science teacher in Tampa, Florida, considers himself a general sports fan and said he enjoys watching the most skillful athletes, regardless of their gender.

Even at the high school level, he is impressed by the finesse he sees female athletes demonstrate.

Sometimes its more impressive than watching masculine people banging their heads against the wall, he said.

___ The AP-NORC poll of 1,260 adults was conducted April 17-21, using a sample drawn from NORCs probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the US population.

The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points..

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