How Brands Like H&R Block, Degree and LG Are Closing the Equity Gap for NIL in College Sports

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. 

According to SponsorUnited, despite accounting for six of the Top 10 NIL categories that account for 70% of total NIL sponsorships, women still receive fewer sponsorships and lower compensation than their male counterparts. H&R Block CMO Jill Cress said that while there’s work to be done, she sees progress toward NIL equity.

“We have started to see momentum, and this is encouraging,” she said. “The conversation is starting to cause things to move in the right direction.”

Unilever’s Degree antiperspirant brand has spent three years as a March Madness sponsor and has been active in the NIL space. This year, it’s offered $25,000 NIL deals and professional mentorships from Unilever to four college basketball walk-on players who didn’t have scholarships. Partnering with two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo on a social media campaign promoting the effort, Degree split its NIL deals evenly between men’s and women’s players and built on last year’s Bracket Gap Challenge campaign that was designed to draw more attention to the women’s tournament and the need for better facilities for women’s sports. 

“We wanted to also bring attention to the athletes that are grinding every day in other schools that may not get necessarily the same attention,” said Desi Okeke, Degree’s brand director. “Also, their story: Their story of adversity and that mindset around not being done yet no matter what.”

When LG wanted to address concerns around NCAA student athletes’ mental health going into March Madness, it brought in Haley Jones (Stanford), Flau’Jae Johnson (LSU), Trayce Jackson-Davis (Indiana) and Jarace Walker (University of Houston) to talk about their experiences for its Game4Good campaign. With both men and women in college athletics still dealing with residual mental health concerns after the pandemic, LG offered athletes $10,000 for the mental health charity of their choice—with an eye toward equity. 

 “We tried to keep a broad perspective on bringing as many voices to represent as many people that are affected by mental health as possible,” said Jeanine Lee, LG’s director of brand marketing. “Our main criteria really was to make sure that the student athletes that we partnered with were advocates and already active in the space of mental health.”

The players’ case

While brands make a public push for NIL equity, women in collegiate athletics have strengthened the argument through their own influential brands.

Largely through TikTok and Instagram, athletes in women’s college sports are outpacing their male counterparts for comments, saves and likes. SponsorUnited notes that female athletes engage with social media at a higher percentage than men in softball and baseball (86.8% for female players/13.2% for males), soccer (98.6%/1.8%), basketball (54.4%/45.5%) and golf (51.8%/48.2%). That’s leading to gains for women in NIL brand categories like apparel, where womens’ percentage of deals was 40% higher than men’s.

Despite accounting for just 30% of the athletes in SponsorUnited’s research pool, women make up half of the Top 50 athletes by social media engagement—including six of the Top 10. As SponsorUnited’s Lynch notes, that means female athletes are engaging with their sponsor brands more on social media as well, which has led to an average of 2.4 NIL deals for them compared to 1.8 for their male counterparts.

In March Madness terms, SponsorUnited noted that women’s college basketball players generated 4.1 million social media engagements—or 2.9 times more than the 1.6 million created by their male counterparts. That’s despite having 10% fewer deals, 13% fewer posts, 15% fewer brands working with women than men and 35% fewer female players having deals than male players.

While men’s sports still tend to draw more followers, Lynch said engagement could eventually tip the NIL balance in women’s favor.

“What we should really see is a flip from the majority of male athletes having deals to the majority of female athletes having deals,” Lynch said,

Advocacy organization The Drake Group wrote a letter to the Department of Education/Office for Civil Rights earlier this year asking for oversight of NIL collectives, which could also help reduce the imbalance in payouts. However, brand and social media efforts are already making a difference for the athletes as well. Jordy Bahl, a sophomore pitcher for the reigning 2022 national champion Oklahoma softball team, didn’t know what to expect from NIL deals when she entered college. Now part of H&R Block’s A Fair Shot program, she said the deals taught her lessons about self-employment and quarterly tax payments amid criticisms that they were “changing college athletics.”

“What people with this opinion do not realize is that as athletes we do not have time to work jobs,” Bahl said. “We would have no income without NIL, and in some people’s cases, no one to help them out.”

Aniya Hoggatt, a jumper on the Florida A&M track and field team, also joined H&R Block’s group and saw NIL deals as opportunities for student athletes like herself to get exposure and build a personal brand. While she said she now has income that her responsibilities as a student and athlete wouldn’t have allowed her to earn, she’s seen flaws in the wage gap and the NIL recruitment process that are worth improving.

“More companies need to become aware of their biases when offering certain deals to specific athletes,” Hoggatt said. “They need to evaluate if they are prioritizing certain athletes based on gender, race, or sport and why that is.”

Before Anessa Campos signed an NIL deal with H&R Block, the Cal State Northridge soccer star had already played on the 2022 U.S. Deaf Women’s National Soccer Team that won the Olympic Gold Medal at the Deaflympics in Brazil. She, too, liked the idea of NIL deals rewarding athletes for the work they put into their sport. The reality of NIL deals has been somewhat more limited, as “we do not choose these opportunities; they chose us.” She appreciates how her H&R Block deal offset costs and gave her motivation, but knows the playing field hasn’t quite leveled.

“Unfortunately, because most of these NIL deals are strategically and selectively given, it is not as equitable as it is thought to be,” Campos said. “Many big brands focus on big sports and big names. Not all sports have the same platform or publicity which lowers the opportunities given to some sports as well as women’s sports in general.”