ESPN pivoted from Sunday Night Baseball to Women’s Sports Sundays this summer, as part of a broader embrace of women’s sports such as the WNBA and NWSL. Fueled largely by the enormous draw of Indiana Fever superstar Caitlin Clark, it’s proved a prudent business move, as WNBA games on ABC and ESPN have averaged 1.2 million viewers, up 5% from last year.
However, ESPN isn’t the only network benefiting from the surging popularity of women’s sports. Per Sports Media Watch, WNBA regular-season games were averaging 756,000 viewers across all networks as of Wednesday, August 5.
On Thursday, Front Office Sports’ Ellyn Briggs reported that the WNBA isn’t the only women’s sports league surging in popularity.
“28.3 billion minutes of women’s sports were viewed in the first half of 2026, up 18% over 2025,” Briggs reported.
28.3 billion minutes of women’s sports were viewed in the first half of 2026, up 18% over 2025, according to new data from @nielsen
A study conducted by the company also found that 52% of the U.S. population is now interested in women’s sports. (The share who report having “no…
— Ellyn Briggs (@EllynBriggs) August 13, 2026
“A study conducted by [Nielsen] also found that 52% of the U.S. population is now interested in women’s sports. (The share who report having “no interest” has dropped almost 20% in the last three years.)”
The Nielsen report supports ESPN VP of women’s sports programming Susie Piotrkowski’s March claim that men were just as interested in women’s sports.
“If you look at the gender breakdown for women’s sports consumption, it’s largely 50-50,” Piotrkowski said.
“Our 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’s sports. So we’re really intentional about how we talk about (Women’s Sports Sundays), how we position it, and who we bring 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.”
In 2002, former ESPN executive Mark Shapiro relegated the WNBA to ESPN2, helping create a cycle in which being stuck on smaller platforms has hindered the growth of women’s sports and led to hesitancy to spotlight them. However, as the NCAA women’s basketball tournament has shown, programming women’s sports on larger platforms is attracting an enormous audience, and it’s only growing.
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