We Grew Wings teaser
The full OregonLive article is copy-pasted below:
40 years after Title IX, disparities remain, UO professor and Nike exec tell law students
In the 40th anniversary year of Title IX, the federal law intended to bring equality to men's and women's athletics, Peg Brand sees at least one measurement of the remaining disparity.
"What percentage of TV sports coverage is devoted to women's athletics?" Brand asked an audience of law students Friday at a University of Oregon Law School-sponsored conference.
None of the 150 in the audience guessed correctly. It was 5 percent in 1989, she said, rising to 8.7 percent in 1999, according to figures in the 2010 University of Southern California study, "Gender in Televised Sports."
But by 2009, it had dropped to 1.6 percent, Brand said. Brand was one of three participants on the "Women in Sports and Entertainment" panel at the 2012 Sports and Entertainment Law Conference, alongside Ellen Devlin, a long-time Nike employee who now works as an adjunct professor of sports products at the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon; and Eryn Potempa, a Nike attorney in the sports marketing group.
Brand, an academic with professor appointments at both UO and Indiana University, said a potential audience exists for televised women's sports but television executives have hesitated to tap into the market -- more comfortable with the certain revenue from men's basketball and football.
"The executives at ESPN may be a little too old school," said Brand, wife of Myles Brand, the former NCAA president and University of Oregon and Indiana University president who died in 2009.
Potempa, who represents Nike in sponsorship and endorsement contract negotiations with athletes and their agents as well as sports leagues, said the reason for a disparity in television coverage for men's and women's sports was simple.
"The coverage in media is driven by revenue," said the Lewis and Clark law school graduate. "Men's sports -- that's where the revenue is coming from."
Potempa, though, pointed to the University of Portland women's soccer teams, winners of the NCAA championship in 2002 and 2005, as proof that a women's team can be even more popular than the men's team on a campus.
Devlin agreed about men's sports driving revenue, but asked the audience for a show of hands of people who watched at least some of last year's women's World Cup soccer tournament. Nearly every hand went up.
Devlin acknowledged that Nike, where she started working alongside co-founder Bill Bowerman nearly three decades ago, bore some responsibility for women arriving late to the revenue table.
Up until the mid-1990s, she said, company executives debated the merits of prominently featuring women in marketing campaigns.
The company settled on Gabrielle Reece as its first featured woman athlete.
Reece, who could have made a career as a model just as easily as a competitive beach volleyball player, may not have been the best woman athlete in the world at the time.
But, Devlin said, "You have to start somewhere."
She noted Reece's signing soon was followed by soccer star Mia Hamm and basketball star Sheryl Swoopes.
"I've been talking to Vin Lananna," Devlin said of the University of Oregon track coach. "He believes women's track and field has a better chance than women's basketball of becoming a revenue sport."
Devlin has been talking to Lananna in part because of her role in producing the documentary, "We Grew Wings," a retrospective on the women's track team at the University of Oregon. Before the panel discussion began, Devlin showed a video trailer that included the emotional stories of many of the women who competed in the shadow of the far higher profile men's track team, led by Bowerman, who co-founded Nike with middle distance runner Phil Knight.
"We have to figure out how to monetize women's sports," Devlin told the relatively youthful audience. "or we'll be having these same conversations when your children are in these chairs."
--Allan Brettman
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