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The gap between how male and female student athletes are paid for their name, image and likeness spans the length of just about every college football field in the United States, but brands are starting to bridge that divide.
According to Opendorse—which has helped nearly 90,000 student athletes broker so-called NIL deals with brands including Amazon, Meta and Pepsi since the Supreme Court opened the door for NIL in 2021—roughly 77% of all NIL compensation goes to male athletes. Sam Weber, head of Opendorse’s brand marketing and communications, noted that football alone accounts for 55% of all NIL compensation in 2023.
He adds that NIL collectives—groups of university boosters that work to secure deals for athletes on “revenue-generating” programs like football and men’s basketball—also tilt the compensation imbalance toward male athletes. Without football or NIL collectives, Weber said, the NIL earnings split would be 54% for men and 46% for women.
But even facing those obstacles, women in collegiate athletics are making their own arguments for a more equitable NIL pay landscape. Last year’s women’s March Madness had 4.85 million viewers on ESPN, while the entire tournament averaged 634,000 viewers per game—a 16% increase from 2021. College sports, including softball and volleyball, have become revenue-generating sports and have drawn an increasing number of sponsors as ratings on ESPN rise.
Most notably, as Weber points out, six out of the top 10 most marketable players in the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments this year have been women. SponsorUnited, a sports analytics platform specializing in partnerships, noted in its NIL Marketing Partnerships Report that the 186% growth in NIL deals among women’s college basketball players last year was second only to football players. That encouraged brands including H&R Block, Degree and LG to continue or increase their efforts toward creating a more fair NIL environment and drawing attention to the value and marketability of women’s sports.
“We also track music artists, and female music artists just consistently way outperform male artists in terms of branded, promoted posts and engagement. They dominate the space,” said SponsorUnited founder and CEO Bob Lynch. “If you take football out of it, you’re ultimately going to see female athletes exceed male athletes in terms of the number of brands and volume of deals.”
The brand brigade
Last year, H&R Block entered the first March Madness of the NIL era—and the first to include the women’s tournament—by launching its A Fair Shot program highlighting gender disparity in NIL deals and the tax implications of NIL income. After sponsoring 19 female college athletes in 2022, the company teamed up with Fabletics and Jamby’s this year, called in sports firm Playbook to help with scouting and backed 50 athletes from 13 different sports across NCAA Division I, II and III schools, as well as Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
