The reaction to ESPN creating a primetime women’s sports window to replace Sunday Night Baseball starting this summer was predictable.
Despite the fact that the WNBA and NWSL are the biggest properties in the ESPN lineup that are in-season during the summer, many attempted to paint the move as anti-men’s sports or some grand kowtowing gesture to a certain sect of sports fans.
But as ESPN VP of women’s sports programming Susie Piotrkowski revealed in an interview on The Varsity podcast, that part of the network’s push for Women’s Sports Sundays came from internal data showing a largely even split between men and women for its women’s sports content across all platforms.
“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 are talking about (Women’s Sports Sundays), how we are positioning it, and who we are bringing 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.”
The WSS series will run from after the NBA and NHL seasons through the start of college and pro football. Typically a quiet time in the sports calendar, ESPN is hoping that programming and promoting top games during the stretch run of the WNBA and NWSL seasons can replace the legacy franchise of Sunday Night Baseball, which averaged 1.8 million viewers per week last season.
Rather than just catering to WSS windows aimed at women audiences, ESPN believes it can continue to draw large numbers of men to tune in as well.
“Women’s sports are for everyone. I think that there was a perception historically that only women were watching women’s sports. Actually, it couldn’t be more wrong. It tended to be, like, older men that were consuming women’s sports,” Piotrkowski explained. “But now we’re seeing growth in almost every category. Growth among women, growth among men 18 to 34 (years old).”
WNBA games averaged 1.3 million viewers for the Worldwide Leader in 2025; NWSL games have much further to go to catch up to MLB or other premier sports.
Still, one of the main arguments made by leaders in women’s sports for years has been that keeping games on smaller platforms is a self-fulfilling cycle that keeps these leagues from growing. At ESPN, the NCAA women’s basketball tournament has shown that networks get a return on investment when they program games on larger platforms.
Women’s Sports Sundays may have arisen in part by necessity, but ESPN appears confident it will pay off.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.