One Tuesday morning in late February, a fan in New York who logged into FanDuel’s online sportsbook would’ve found 33 men’s college basketball games listed to bet on and zero women’s games. That fan could place an online wager on some midmajor men’s contests, such as Western Illinois vs. Lindenwood, Troy vs. Texas State and Bowling Green vs. Eastern Michigan. However, no odds were listed for women’s games involving power conference programs like Arizona vs. Texas Tech or Iowa State vs. UCF.
The following day wasn’t much different. FanDuel posted odds on 49 men’s college basketball games for New York state bettors, compared to only seven women’s games. There was a 50-11 discrepancy on another day. You can guess which sport had more betting markets.
Now it’s March, and the 2025 women’s NCAA Tournament begins later this week. March and April are the sport’s shining moments — for players, coaches, fans and even sportsbooks. March Madness (men’s and women’s) is the biggest annual betting event in the U.S.
But in women’s college basketball, the March Madness betting boomlet masks regular-season betting inequities.
Women’s college basketball is in the midst of a historic growth period. Last year, the women’s NCAA Tournament championship game outrated the men’s final in viewership for the first time. Caitlin Clark’s popularity also sparked new records for sports betting on women’s college basketball during the tournament. But, in the regular season especially, the differences between how legal online sportsbooks in the U.S. handle the two sports remain stark. It leaves some sports gamblers wondering why it’s so hard to bet on women’s college basketball.
Industry experts point to a number of factors. Resource allocation, product placement and questions about demand are among them. Some see it as a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma.
“How does it get more attractive if you only get people there if they search for it instead of pushing it more aggressively out?” asked Laila Mintas, a strategic advisor and longtime executive in the sports, sports betting & iGaming space.
Sportsbooks are interested in creating markets — a type of bet someone can make, including moneyline, point spread and totals — they think will garner interest and be profitable. They make daily choices about what to list, what betting limits they apply to prospective wagers and about lines themselves.
Historically, online legal sportsbooks in the U.S. haven’t been as interested in women’s basketball markets.
“You have to be intentional about wanting to do this,” said Brett Abarbanel, an associate professor and executive director at UNLV’s International Gaming Institute.
That seemed evident last March as sports betting involving Clark’s Iowa games showed what was possible when books were intentional in their women’s college basketball listings. Johnny Avello, the director of sportsbook operations at DraftKings, said women’s college basketball betting was “pretty stagnant” until Clark rose to prominence. Then, “(it) became very interesting to bettors, especially in-game wagering,” he said.
The 2024 NCAA women’s championship broke BetMGM’s record for the most-bet women’s sporting event of all time. Clark player props were their most-bet tickets in last year’s NCAA Tournament (men’s and women’s).
Talk about being intentional: Clark bets were displayed front and center, often fed to users as one of the most prominent tabs or pop-ups on a sportsbook’s online app.
Hannah Luther, the women’s basketball trader at BetMGM, said she was curious about whether the “Caitlin Clark Effect” would wear off this season. But interest has remained. “We’ve been shown that people are definitely interested even though she’s moved on to the WNBA,” she said.
Yet, there is still a noticeable difference between how men’s college basketball regular season games and women’s college basketball games are displayed on online sportsbooks, according to Ceyda Mumcu, a professor of sport management at the University of New Haven. While men’s college basketball games are often presented prominently on legal sportsbook apps — found via a simple tap of an NCAAB button, for example — finding women’s college basketball games often involves thumbing through an online sportsbook’s listings. It might take two, three or four taps of a button to find a women’s game, instead of one on the men’s side.
“It is not as accessible, and you have to dig and click around to find it if it is there,” Mumcu said.
Added Mintas: “They make it so hard for us to bet what we’re looking for by hiding it somewhere down in the tabs.”
But presentation is just one factor limiting women’s college basketball betting. Industry insiders point to sportsbook staffing discrepancies as another reason for the still-stark difference between men’s and women’s basketball betting.
Promoting a sport takes a commitment to resources. Fanatics, for instance, has five full-time traders who handle everything basketball, but no singular person focused on women’s college basketball. Not until the women’s NCAA Tournament will they have traders solely working on women’s games.
Luther began working at BetMGM in January 2024 in a general trading role. Amid a flood of interest in women’s basketball, the company quickly realized it needed somebody to focus on women’s sports. So Luther took the lead on women’s basketball trading and is the first person to hold that role at the company. BetMGM has increased its investment in the sport; the company says it went from offering 250 games in the 2022-23 regular season to 1,200 this year. And yet, there is still room for growth, and many books still don’t have a specific role focused on women’s basketball.
Staffing is just one aspect of sportsbook resource allocation, however. Focusing on one sport can mean diverting resources away from other aspects of sportsbook operations.
“Developing an emerging sport for betting requires the obvious work, like building and testing pricing models and rejiggering your sportsbook to include the markets,” Chris Grove, a partner at Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, a gambling research and consulting firm, wrote in an email. “Then there’s the less obvious work, like learning the who, how and why of betting on the sport, building sport-specific promotional and marketing strategies and identifying and accounting for any integrity components that might be unique to the sport.”
Risk management is another factor that accounts for listing differences between the two sports. In general, sportsbook operators can set their own lines with the raw data they are fed from providers or take ready-to-go products compiled by prominent data collectors. For most markets, sportsbooks establish an automated process where odds are set and adjusted algorithmically based on these inputs.
But for emerging or test markets, traders may choose to set the odds manually — with prices inputted fully by the trader — to gauge interest. Fanatics basketball trader Ethan Useloff said they sometimes receive requests through customer service for specific women’s markets that the book doesn’t yet have available. In that case, if they aren’t sure the market will be popular, they will have a trader set the lines manually, a process that can be more time-consuming.
At BetMGM, some of the processes they automate for men’s college basketball, they don’t automate for women’s basketball. “So putting up a smaller game is going to take more effort if it’s a women’s game rather than a men’s,” Luther said.
Useloff said another way that a sportsbook can reduce risk is by setting limits on the amount of money a bettor can put down, so the book isn’t on the hook for as much. Lowering the limit also mitigates the risk of a sharper bettor catching a line that’s been entered wrong or gone off-market. But it also might make a bet less appealing to a potential consumer.
“The bookmaker is always trying to balance the book,” Mintas said. “You have to make sure you have enough volume to make sure your book is balanced.”
But, for those committed to betting on women’s basketball, there are still avenues for it. Interest is apparent when comparing legal sportsbook markets in the U.S. with illegal (anyone who’s offering gambling and does not have a license for their jurisdiction) markets.
According to YieldSec, a leading technical marketplace intelligence platform, there were more than 4.1 times as many illegal women’s basketball bet market offerings last year (in college and the WNBA), not including predictors, than legal offerings in the U.S. They found there was nearly as much money bet last year on women’s basketball illegally ($1.49 billion) as on men’s basketball legally ($1.55 billion).
“The lack of betting offers from the legal industry is weirdly, inadvertently, unconsciously, unknowingly, maybe, driving people into illegal gambling because they can’t find the bets they want on legal sites,” said Ismail Vali, YieldSec’s founder and CEO. “(Illegal gambling companies) just see it as more content equals more money.”
Like other historical investment gaps in women’s sports, it’s unsurprising to see similar differences between men’s and women’s basketball gambling. YieldSec tracked $5.2 billion in bets placed on illegal and legal offerings on men’s basketball (NBA and college) last year, compared to $1.83 billion on women’s basketball (WNBA and college).
But as women’s college basketball ratings continue to demonstrate, the sport is a growing marketplace. Gambling industry experts still see women’s college basketball as an avenue legal sportsbooks aren’t taking full advantage of.
“I think it’s a loss of a big revenue stream that they could have had,” Mintas said.
Some sportsbooks have adjusted. Luther, the BetMGM trader, said the sportsbook has seen a 750 percent increase in the number of bets over the last two years.
“Some of our growth can be attributed to the fact that we’ve been putting up more markets and more games, but not all of it,” Luther said. “We haven’t been putting up 700 percent more markets for people to bet on, so clearly, there’s also more interest in the sport.”
Assuming interest continues to grow, BetMGM plans to keep expanding its markets and narrowing the gap between men’s and women’s offerings. Avello, the DraftKings executive, said he expects this year’s women’s NCAA Tournament to be as big as any before. Nevertheless, he said the men’s and women’s tournament betting totals aren’t comparable.
Abarbanel said that she doesn’t expect such a stark disparity between men’s and women’s college basketball betting in five years. And yet, for now, many industry insiders still believe that those who put a dollar value on the games themselves don’t value women’s college basketball enough.
“The mentality needs to change, and we can’t necessarily see that across the board just yet,” Mumcu said.
Future tournaments will also serve as check-in points for that growth. But perhaps the true sign of how much the disparity has decreased — and how much more opportunity sits in the gap — can be found by opening a sportsbook on an otherwise unmemorable regular-season night.
— The Athletic’s Hannah Vanbiber contributed to this report.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Getty)
