BROOKLYN, NY – September 8: New York Liberty mascot Ellie poses for photos with fans during a game at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York on September 8, 2024. (Photo by Peter Fisher for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The Washington Post via Getty Images
For decades, women have been treated as an afterthought in the sports industry. Women’s sports have been dismissed as a “sideshow,” while men’s sports remain the “main show.” Beyond that, general experiences, merchandise, and marketing in sports have overwhelmingly been designed with male fans in mind. However, an influx of female fans is shifting the landscape of consumer behavior in sports and challenging sports business decision makers to think and act differently.
In 2023, Nielsen noted, “The most distinctive shift in sports in the last 50 years has been the rapid rise in the importance, influence, and value of female fans.” Today, women’s sports represent the fastest-growing segment of the global sports economy, and female fans are flocking to arenas and stadiums at record rates.
Helping quantify this transformation is CrowdIQ, a global leader in capturing live event data through high-resolution gigapixel photography. By combining advanced crowd imaging with computer vision, CrowdIQ reveals who is actually in the audience and how they engage. From demographics to arrival times, merchandise adoption to content interaction, the company provides leagues, venues, and sponsors with a more complete picture of fandom by analyzing bird’s-eye view data that traditional ticketing systems simply can’t capture.
Filling A Critical Data Gap
CrowdIQ’s latest report, “Quantifying the Female Fan Advantage,” uses advanced crowd analytics to measure beyond ticket sales and attendance and examines in-venue fan behaviors of female fans across both men’s and women’s sporting events.
“Ticketing data is fantastic data, but it tells part of the story,” said Rachel Goodger, Chief Revenue Officer at CrowdIQ. “In order to know who’s truly in a venue, you need to look at everyone in a venue.”
CrowdIQ’s new reports looks at the behaviors of 300,000 fans across both men’s and women’s sports. The result: a dataset that reveals how women engage with sports differently in terms of demographics, arrival times, content interaction, and merchandise adoption.
For Katherine Rowe, CrowdIQ’s VP of Client Strategy & Insights, this demographic evolution highlights opportunity. “We saw a gap in the market where we could really attack with our data and be able to provide context to how these fans are actually behaving, especially with the attendance growth that we’re seeing across the leagues,” said Rowe.
The Key Findings
The report found that sports events consistently draw crowds that are more than 60% female. At men’s events, however, while the overall crowd is mostly male-dominated, a closer look at the data tells a different story among younger fans. “Younger fans are now nearly fifty-fifty gender split,” Goodger noted. “That really signals a fundamental shift in fandom.”
Beyond demographic differences, one of the most distinct behavioral differences between male and female sports fans lies in when women arrive. “Across both men’s and women’s sports we see female fans arrive earlier, which is potentially because there are fan fests or sponsored tie-ins,” said Rowe. This early-arrival pattern matters as it creates “premium pregame engagement windows,” where venues have the opportunity to maximize sponsorship activations and concession revenue.
CrowdIQ also uncovered important differences in merchandise adoption. At men’s events, about half of women wear team gear, reflecting traditional fandom. At women’s events, only about 30% of attendees wear team merch, while league-branded and culturally resonant merchandise plays a much larger role.
When it comes to in-venue content, women engage most with interactive, participatory content such as “dance cams” or calls from emcees to “get loud”, while men are more likely to focus on informational and promotional content.
The Future Of Fandom
By understanding fan behavior in a sports landscape that is increasingly becoming more female, sports leaders can capture new revenue, strengthen sponsor ROI, and build lasting fan loyalty. CrowdIQ’s analytics reveal that optimizing for female fans has the potential to unlock significant business opportunities in sports. “Making these kinds of shifts gives teams opportunities to see pretty substantial revenue boosts, if they look at the data,” said Goodger.
