How Women’s Sports Are Outpacing Men’s in Tech Adoption

The old story said women’s sports had to catch up. I’m Cassandra Toroian, and I’ve spent 25 years in technology and entrepreneurship, so when I look at what’s happening now, I don’t think that’s the right story anymore – not in tech.

In tech, women’s sports may be doing something smarter.

They’re skipping the broken middle.

Men’s sports had the head start. Bigger budgets. Older broadcast deals. More established data departments. More history. More infrastructure. Fine – all true. But infrastructure can become baggage. Old systems get patched, protected, defended, and duct-taped for years because nobody wants to admit the whole thing needs rebuilding.

Women’s sports are scaling in a different moment. The audience is growing now. The fan base is digital now. The athlete-performance questions are urgent now. The platforms are available now. And because many leagues, teams, and organizations are still building the foundation, they can build with data, AI, fan engagement, athlete health, and direct digital relationships baked in from the start.

That’s the part people keep missing.

Women’s sports are not just catching up. In some places, they’re moving past the old model completely.

The Old Story Was Catching Up. That’s Not the Whole Story Anymore

Women’s sports are still under-resourced compared with men’s sports in plenty of places. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Men’s leagues still have more total money, larger media systems, deeper facilities, and older commercial machines behind them.

But “more money” is not the same thing as “moving faster.”

This matters right now because women’s sports are growing at a pace that makes slow infrastructure impossible. Deloitte projects global women’s elite sports revenues will reach at least $3 billion in 2026, a 340% increase since 2022. This is not small growth. It’s a market forcing everyone around it to move.

McKinsey found between 2022 and 2024, revenue from women’s sports grew 4.5 times faster than men’s sports revenue. Again – it doesn’t mean women’s sports are bigger overall. They’re not. But they are moving fast enough for the old “wait your turn” model to look ridiculous.

And the audience is not imaginary anymore. Nielsen reported 46 billion minutes of women’s sports were consumed in the U.S. in 2025. Nielsen also reported the NWSL had 39.3 million fans in 2025, up from 30.8 million in 2023.

That kind of growth creates pressure. You need better video. Better data. Better fan products. Better digital distribution. Better athlete monitoring. Better sponsorship measurement. Better everything.

And here’s the funny thing – when you’re forced to build fast, you sometimes build cleaner.

Women’s Sports Are Scaling in the Current Tech Era

A lot of men’s sports infrastructure was built in a world where broadcast was the center of everything. The league controlled the rights. The network controlled the audience. The fan showed up through TV, newspapers, radio, tickets, and maybe a team website that looked like it was built during the Stone Age.

Women’s sports are scaling in a very different world.

Fans discover players through TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, streaming platforms, podcasts, short clips, behind-the-scenes content, newsletters, athlete-led channels, league apps, and yes – actual games too. The athlete is the media channel. The team is the media channel. The league is the media channel. The fan doesn’t wait for a broadcast window to care.

This changes the tech stack.

You need first-party data. You need direct fan relationships. You need social listening. You need content workflows. You need mobile experiences. You need personalized engagement. You need real-time analytics. You need a way to turn attention into actual business without handing the entire relationship to someone else.

This is where women’s sports can move faster because they are not as locked into the old playbook.

The WNBA is a good example. Deloitte describes the WNBA app as a digital experience built to strengthen the league’s brand, deepen fan engagement, access real-time analytics, and keep fans inside the WNBA ecosystem instead of losing them to third-party platforms.

That’s the modern move.

Not just “get more viewers.”

Own more of the relationship.

Because attention without data is fragile. You can trend for a week and still not know who your fans are, what they want, what they buy, how often they come back, or why they leave.

Women’s sports are learning this fast.

Newer Leagues Can Skip Legacy Systems

This is one of the biggest reasons I think women’s sports have an opening.

Legacy systems are expensive in ways people don’t always see. They slow decisions. They create internal politics. They make teams protect old workflows because everyone already trained on them. They turn simple questions into software archaeology.

Women’s sports, in some cases, have the advantage of not having to protect what never served them well in the first place.

That’s not a small thing.

If you’re building a scouting system today, why would you build it around static PDFs and disconnected film notes? If you’re building fan engagement today, why would you only think in broadcast impressions? If you’re building performance research today, why would you rely on old assumptions from male-centered datasets and pretend they apply cleanly to everyone?

You wouldn’t.

You’d build differently.

That’s why the tech adoption in women’s sports feels so interesting right now. It’s not just “add an app.” It’s a chance to build the operating system differently – video, data, performance, fan engagement, athlete health, commercial insights, all connected earlier.

And when you’re not stuck defending the old system, you can move.

AI Video and Tracking Are Already Inside Women’s Leagues

This is where the “women’s sports are behind” story really starts to crack.

The NWSL extended its partnership with Spiideo in 2024, with Spiideo fitting league stadiums with multi-angle AI automated camera systems and giving all teams access to its AI player-tracking and video analytics platform. Spiideo also says its AutoData tools can generate game event data and individual player tracking data, including heat maps and performance statistics for coaching staff.

That’s not decorative tech.

It’s coaching tech. Analysis tech. Development tech. Tactical tech.

The WNBA made its own big move with Genius Sports and Second Spectrum. In 2024, the WNBA announced a leaguewide optical tracking partnership, making it the first U.S. women’s professional sports league with leaguewide 3D tracking data. The system uses cameras in every WNBA arena to collect low-latency player pose and ball-tracking data.

That matters because once you have leaguewide tracking, the game changes.

Teams can study spacing, shot quality, player movement, paint touches, movement efficiency, defensive impact, and all the things the box score has always been terrible at explaining. It also creates a deeper foundation for broadcasts, fan products, scouting, player development, and analytics.

This is not women’s sports politely asking to borrow the old model.

It’s women’s sports building the data layer.

Performance Tech Matters More When the Research Gap Is This Big

Here’s the part that should make everyone a little uncomfortable.

Women athletes have been competing at elite levels for years inside systems that often did not study them properly. Training, injury prevention, recovery, cycle tracking, workload, footwear, equipment, nutrition, return-to-play protocols – too much of it has been built from incomplete research or adapted from male-centered models.

That’s not just unfair.

It’s bad performance design.

The NWSL and NWSLPA joining Project ACL in 2026 is a big example of how this is changing. Reuters reported the NWSL and its players’ union joined the global initiative to reduce ACL injuries in professional women’s soccer, noting women athletes are more than twice as likely to suffer ACL injuries as men while women make up only 8% of sports science study subjects.

FIFPRO says Project ACL is tracking workload, travel, and “critical zone” appearances – games with less than five days of recovery time – through its Player Workload Monitoring tool to assess links between scheduling demands and injury risk.

That is exactly where tech has to go.

Not just faster clips. Not just better fan graphics. Actual athlete-specific evidence.

Because if the research gap is this big, women’s sports cannot just copy men’s sports and call it progress. The demands are different. The bodies are different. The history of underinvestment is different. The questions are different.

The tech has to reflect it.

The Athlete-Specific Data Gap Is Finally Getting Called Out

Olympic cyclist Kristen Faulkner is a strong example here because she didn’t wait for the system to catch up. She built her own AI system using years of biometric and training data because the research she needed on her body did not exist.

Her own post says she collected data including heart rate, HRV, sleep, weight, power, temperature, training load, menstrual cycle phases, bloodwork, and DEXA scans. CyclingNews reported her system used 4,400 hours of training history to model her physiology and generate actionable outputs.

This is the future, whether people are ready for it or not. Not one-size-fits-all athlete dashboards. Actual personalized performance models.

And this is where women athletes may push sports tech harder than anyone else – because the generic model did not serve them. When the existing research is thin, when the tools don’t connect the right signals, when the app gives you one slice and not the whole pattern, the athlete starts asking different questions.

What does my cycle do to my output?

How does sleep interact with training load?

What does recovery look like for me?

What data actually predicts my best performance?

This kind of questioning can make the technology better for everyone. But women athletes are often the ones forcing it because the old defaults were never neutral.

They were just old defaults.

Fan Engagement Is Digital-First Because It Has to Be

Women’s sports fans are not waiting for permission from legacy media.

That’s another reason tech adoption is moving fast.

The audience is social, loud, mobile, engaged, and often athlete-driven. Fans follow players across platforms. They want access, context, personality, behind-the-scenes content, live data, better clips, and community. They don’t want to be told a game matters three days after they already made it trend.

This means women’s leagues and teams have to think digitally from the beginning.

The WNBA’s partnership with nVenue is a good example. Reports in 2025 said the WNBA would gain access to nVenue’s analytics platform to power media products and drive real-time fan engagement. Sports Business Journal also reported the partnership gave the WNBA predictive analytics for the 2025 season.

That’s not just a fan toy. It’s part of a bigger shift toward interactive, real-time, data-fed sports experiences.

WMT Digital also reported women’s sports content dominated early summer 2025 social engagement charts, with eight of the top 10 properties belonging to WNBA teams. Use it as a signal, not gospel – it’s a vendor source – but it points to something real: women’s sports fans are already behaving like digital-first audiences.

So if you’re a women’s league building now, why would you build like it’s 2005?

You wouldn’t.

You build for the fan who wants the clip, the context, the live stat, the athlete story, the merch drop, the community, the ticket, and the next game all in the same ecosystem.

Data Ownership Is Becoming the Real Power Move

This is the part people don’t talk about enough.

Tech adoption is not just about better tools. It’s about who owns the relationship.

For a long time, sports properties relied heavily on outside platforms, broadcasters, sponsors, and media partners to reach fans. This still matters. Of course it does. But the more valuable the audience becomes, the more important it is for leagues and teams to understand the audience directly.

Who are they?

Where did they come from?

Which players do they follow?

What content brings them back?

What games do they watch?

What do they buy?

What turns casual attention into loyalty?

That’s why apps, data systems, CRM, ticketing integration, content personalization, and direct digital products matter so much. They’re not just “marketing.” They’re infrastructure.

Women’s sports can’t afford to build massive audiences and then know nothing about them.

That would be insane.

And because women’s sports are scaling in this digital moment, they can treat fan data as foundational instead of an afterthought.

That’s a huge difference.

Men’s Sports Still Have More Capital – But That’s Not the Same as Moving Faster

Let’s keep the nuance here.

Men’s sports are still ahead in total capital, facilities, staff size, media rights, analytics budgets, and global infrastructure in many areas. Pretending otherwise would be silly.

But it doesn’t mean every men’s sports organization is more advanced.

Bigger ships turn slower.

A men’s league with 50 years of systems may have more technology, but it may also have more friction. More approvals. More legacy vendors. More internal resistance. More “we’ve always done it this way.” More people who built careers around the old model and don’t want the new one to expose anything.

Women’s sports may not have the same scale everywhere yet. But they may have more urgency, more flexibility, and more willingness to experiment.

And sometimes this beats money.

Not always. But often enough for people to pay attention.

The real question is not, “Do women’s sports have more technology than men’s sports?” The better question is, “Where are women’s sports building cleaner, faster, and more directly for the future?” That’s where the story gets interesting.

The Best Version of This Is Not Copying Men’s Sports

Women’s sports do not need to become a smaller replica of men’s sports.

That would be such a waste.

The opportunity is to build something better. Better athlete research. Better injury prevention. Better fan access. Better data ownership. Better storytelling. Better tech workflows. Better coaching tools. Better digital products. Better alignment between athlete health, performance, media, and business.

Not every league will get this right. Some will chase the shiny thing. Some will copy old systems. Some will overbuild dashboards and underbuild trust. This happens everywhere.

But the opening is there.

Women’s sports can build for the athlete who has been under-studied.

The fan who has been under-served. The sponsor who wants measurable engagement. The coach who needs better evidence. The league that doesn’t want to rent its audience forever. That is not catching up. It’s designing the next version.

How Are Women’s Sports Using Technology?

• Women’s sports use AI video, player tracking, athlete health data, and digital fan tools.
• Many leagues are building cleaner tech systems instead of copying older men’s sports models.

The Cleaner Build Wins

When people look up sports technology, this is the part I want them to understand as Cassandra Toroian: technology is not the point by itself. The point is whether it helps athletes, coaches, leagues, and fans move with better information and fewer excuses.

Women’s sports are outpacing men’s in tech adoption in the places where the old model is weakest – athlete-specific research, digital-first fan relationships, AI video, player tracking, direct engagement, and flexible infrastructure.

Not everywhere. Not automatically. But enough to matter.

The old story said women’s sports had to wait, copy, and catch up. I don’t buy it anymore.

The better story is women’s sports are building in the current era, with current tools, for current fans, around athletes who finally deserve technology built for them – not borrowed from someone else’s system.

Men’s sports had the head start. Women’s sports may have the cleaner build.

And if you’re building in the future while everyone else is still duct-taping the past… Don’t be surprised when the so-called underdog moves faster.

References

Deloitte – Game Changers: Unlocking the Potential of Women’s Sports: https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/about/press-room/deloitte-announces-womens-sports-revenue-report.html

McKinsey – Closing the Monetization Gap in Women’s Sports: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/closing-the-monetization-gap-in-womens-sports-a-2-point-5-billion-dollar-opportunity

Nielsen – 46 Billion Minutes of Women’s Sports Consumed in 2025: https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2026/nielsen-46-billion-minutes-of-womens-sports-were-consumed-in-2025/

Deloitte – WNBA App Case Study: https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/what-we-do/case-studies/wnba-app.html

Spiideo – NWSL Extends Partnership With Spiideo: https://www.spiideo.com/news/national-womens-soccer-league-nwsl-extends-partnership-with-spiideo/

WNBA – WNBA and Genius Sports Bring Data Tracking to Every Arena: https://www.wnba.com/news/wnba-genius-sports-data-tracking

Reuters – NWSL Joins Global Project to Cut ACL Injuries: https://www.reuters.com/sports/soccer/us-womens-soccer-league-joins-global-project-cut-acl-injuries-2026-04-22/

FIFPRO – NWSLPA and NWSL Join Project ACL: https://www.fifpro.org/en/articles/2026/04/nwslpa-and-nwsl-join-project-acl-to-support-womens-football-injury-research

Kristen Faulkner – The Research I Needed About My Own Body Did Not Exist: https://www.kristenfaulkner.com/blog/i-built-the-research-with-ai

CyclingNews – Kristen Faulkner Uses AI and 4,400 Hours of Training Data: https://www.cyclingnews.com/pro-cycling/womens-cycling/ai-is-going-to-change-womens-performance-research-from-the-bottom-up-kristen-faulkner-inputs-4-400-hours-of-personal-training-history-and-gains-actionable-output/

WMT Digital – The New Era of Fan Engagement in Women’s Sports: https://wmt.digital/blog/the-new-era-of-fan-engagement-in-womens-sports/