Story by Britney Nguyen
Video by Chip Sweeney
Graphics by Valentina Arismendi
When Jules Micchia was growing up, her parents only took her and her sisters to women’s sports games. Now, Micchia is an athlete herself, competing on the women’s rowing team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Micchia has seen and felt the inequality between men’s and women’s sports.
When a video from Sedona Prince, a center on the University of Oregon’s women’s basketball team, went viral during the NCAA women’s basketball tournament in March, Micchia said she was upset, but not surprised.
The video was a comparison between the men’s and women’s weight rooms at the NCAA tournaments. The women’s weight room in San Antonio showed a small rack of dumbbells and some yoga mats, while the men’s teams in Indianapolis were provided with squat racks, benches, barbells and heavy plates.
What surprised her was that the inequality was so obvious.
“A lot of times, inequality can be very subtle and that’s why it’s harder to pinpoint,” Micchia said.
It was so obvious that Micchia thought maybe it was a good thing. People would be so outraged that they would do something about it. They would realize the issue goes further than what they were seeing from one tournament.
“This was a major tournament and things were this bad, so what do you think’s really going on?” Micchia said.
It wasn’t surprising at all
In 2004, a story series looking at the men’s and women’s basketball programs at UNC was released by Carolina Week, the student television news program at UNC’s journalism school.
Amanda Iler, a member of the Carolina Week team who now works as an attorney in Sacramento, Calif., said the issues highlighted then are still present now.
“You know, men’s basketball has always had a much larger marketing budget, they’ve always had the nice facilities,” Iler said.
When Iler was at UNC, the only time the women’s basketball team played at the Smith Center, was when they played Duke. The rest of the basketball games were in Carmichael Arena which is smaller and older than the Smith Center. Now, the women only play basketball in Carmichael.
The Carolina Week series examined three specific areas: former men’s basketball head coach Roy Williams versus former women’s basketball head coach Sylvia Hatchell; the Smith Center versus Carmichael Arena; and the difference in university spending on marketing each team.
“The women’s team was always coming behind the bend in all of that,” Iler said. “You can’t sit here and say, ‘males are the moneymakers, males are more exciting,’ when you haven’t given the women’s teams the opportunities to do the same thing.”
At the time, Iler said Hatchell was ranked among the better-known women’s coaches in the country. When she resigned in 2019, Hatchell was fifth in career coaching victories in NCAA women’s basketball.
“She was a hugely successful women’s basketball coach and was being paid less than Roy Williams,” Iler said.
Iler said the response to the series was that the men’s team brought in the money, so its facilities and marketing budget were bigger than the women’s.
“You really have a chicken and the egg thing,” Iler said. “Is this happening because men are well-marketed, you know, the push to bring the dollars in is there with them as opposed to women? Or is it the other way around?”
The Title IX Loophole
When the UNC women’s basketball team arrived in San Antonio, players joked about the weight room before Prince’s TikTok went viral.
Dana Gentry, the UNC women’s basketball team content producer, was shocked to see the room in person. She remembers there were only about 10 yoga mats and the weights only went up to 20 pounds.
“It’s not right,” Gentry said. “These are athletes who work just as hard as the men, if not harder because they’re fighting the regular sexism of being a woman.”
The term March Madness is only used to market the men’s basketball games. The phrase is used all over social media, sports broadcasts, and even on the courts themselves. The women’s tournament doesn’t have any special marketable name. The women’s tournament was also not as widely available to stream until this year, the first time every game of the tournament was scheduled to air nationally.
This unequal treatment is legal, even though the athletes are students at schools that are bound by Title IX. Title IX prohibits gender inequality under any education program or activity that receives federal financial assistance. But, according to the 1999 Supreme Court decision in NCAA v. Smith, the court unanimously decided that the NCAA does not fall under the jurisdiction of Title IX.
In a situation like the NCAA tournament, Iler said there should be equity because all of the teams earned the right to be there.
“To me, you know, there is no legitimate reason that exists at that point to give the men awesome swag bags and workout facilities and give the women you know, here’s your Solo cup and your yoga mat,” Iler said, referring to the disparities between what the men’s and women’s teams received at the NCAA tournaments.
Tim Crothers, an adjunct instructor of creative sportswriting at UNC, said what happened at the NCAA tournaments is just the way the NCAA treats its revenue sports versus its non-revenue sports.
“The NCAA is always going to take care of the sports that take care of them,” Crothers said.
Because women’s sports are generally not big revenue producers, they are not going to get the same level of respect and allocation of resources from the NCAA the way men’s sports such as basketball and football do, Crothers said.
Even for all of the UNC women’s soccer team’s success – 21 national championships — it does not bring great revenue to UNC.
“I know that for many years they struggled on a shoestring budget, even though they were winning the national championship, year after year,” said Crothers, who wrote a biography on the women’s team’s coach, Anson Dorrance. “They were still at a point where the university did not allocate enough money to them so that they could truly run the program.”
Inequality at UNC
As a student-athlete at UNC, Micchia tries to walk the line of being grateful for where she is but calling out inequality when she sees it.
“That’s another tough thing when I’m trying to be an advocate but my voice is also somewhat limited,” Micchia said.
Being a female athlete feels like being put under a microscope, she said. Micchia said to be on an equal playing field or to get the same opportunities as men, women have to be overqualified.
“Women are not valued the way men are, and I think the reason sports are as bad as they are is because it mirrors society,” Micchia said.
Through UNCUT Chapel Hill, a platform for student-athletes to share their stories, Micchia hosts a podcast called Benched where she talks with UNC athletes. She said there are episodes that highlight how far behind society is when it comes to supporting women athletes.
After graduation in May 2021, Micchia plans to attend law school at UNC so she can make a difference within the sports institutions she finds issues in.
“I think you can work from within or work from the outside with these agencies to change things and make things better,” Micchia said. “It would be an honor to work in an athletic department and really make those changes from the ground and show that it can be done.”
Micchia does think UNC is one of the leading schools when it comes to equality. One of the upsides, she said, is the FORevHER Tar Heels initiative launched by Carolina Athletics and The Rams Club. Micchia sits on the board for the initiative that promotes equality for women’s athletics at UNC, and has given additional funding to women’s teams. The campaign is to raise $100 million to benefit women’s programs.
“That’s a really big step in the right direction and I really applaud UNC for that,” Micchia said.
Shrinking the gap
Iler said there has to be a financial investment in the women’s team to shrink the gap between the men’s and women’s teams. To bring in the fans, you have to promote the teams and promote the games.
“It’s a twofold response,” Iler said. “There’s got to be a financial bind, and that means facilities, marketing dollars, paying to recruit the best coaches, things like that. You’ve also got to push the fans. You’ve got to market it. You’ve got to get the fans to the games. You’ve got to get the fans to buy into the team and invest in the team emotionally, as well.”
Legislation to narrow the gap is still missing critical components because it’s not going to lead to a fan base or buy-in from the community. The responsibility, she said, needs to be on the athletic directors and the coaches.
Micchia said that watching FORevHER Tar Heels raise money so quickly has also shown her that people care about women’s sports and that times are changing.
“As much as it was so unfortunate what happened at the tournament, really, I think it’s going to bring to light some issues and help promote change,” Micchia said.
