The reaction to ESPN creating a primetime women\u2019s sports window to replace\u00a0Sunday Night Baseball starting this summer was predictable.<\/p>\n
Despite the fact that the WNBA and NWSL are the biggest properties in the ESPN lineup that are in-season during the summer, many attempted to paint the move as anti-men\u2019s sports or some grand kowtowing gesture to a certain sect of sports fans.<\/p>\n
But as ESPN VP of women\u2019s sports programming Susie Piotrkowski revealed in an interview on\u00a0The Varsity\u00a0podcast<\/a>, that part of the network\u2019s push for\u00a0Women\u2019s Sports Sundays came from internal data showing a largely even split between men and women for its women\u2019s sports content across all platforms.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at the gender breakdown for women\u2019s sports consumption, it\u2019s largely 50-50,\u201d Piotrkowski said.<\/p>\n \u201cOur TikTok, our espnW TikTok, is a 50-50 gender split. Our Instagram is a 60-40 gender split female, but that over-indexes tremendously by comparison to a number of our other handles. But it shows that everyone is watching women\u2019s sports. So we\u2019re really intentional about how we are talking about (Women\u2019s Sports Sundays), how we are positioning it, and who we are bringing into this conversation. And that goes horizontally across our entire business. This is not just for women, by women. This is by everyone, every smart mind at ESPN, for the fan.\u201d<\/p>\n The WSS series will run from after the NBA and NHL seasons through the start of college and pro football. Typically a quiet time in the sports calendar, ESPN is hoping that programming and promoting top games during the stretch run of the WNBA and NWSL seasons can replace the legacy franchise of Sunday Night Baseball, which averaged 1.8 million viewers per week last season<\/a>.<\/p>\n Rather than just catering to WSS windows aimed at women audiences, ESPN believes it can continue to draw large numbers of men to tune in as well.<\/p>\n \u201cWomen\u2019s sports are for everyone. I think that there was a perception historically that only women were watching women\u2019s sports. Actually, it couldn\u2019t be more wrong. It tended to be, like, older men that were consuming women\u2019s sports,\u201d Piotrkowski explained. \u201cBut now we\u2019re seeing growth in almost every category. Growth among women, growth among men 18 to 34 (years old).\u201d<\/p>\n