Women’s Basketball Is a Cultural Supernova, But What Comes Next Is Even Bigger

Women’s sports are so wildly popular right now that I sometimes forget that wasn’t always the case. But back in October, we profiled New York Liberty CEO Keia Clarke—who, in 2020, helped shepherd the team from a 2,000-seat arena in the ’burbs to the 17,700-seat Barclays Center in the heart of Brooklyn—and in that interview, she said that many people were skeptical that this many New Yorkers would ever turn out to watch a WNBA team. “I joke that for years my own family wasn’t convinced people would support women’s sports on this scale,” she said.

Fast-forward to right now, and it’s validation o’clock. The Liberty are the reigning league champions, and the Barclays Center is regularly packed to the rafters and roaring. Then there’s the team’s economic impact: Its 2024 season generated nearly $200 million in revenue for New York City, and its co-owner Clara Wu Tsai (note all the female leadership here) recently pledged that the Liberty will become the first $1 billion women’s sports franchise.

This isn’t just about the Liberty, though—even non-sports-fans can feel that women’s basketball is on fire right now. The arguable tipping point came in 2024, when the NCAA women’s basketball championship game averaged 18.7 million viewers–with 24 million at its peak—crushing viewership of the men’s game (14.8 million) and marking the first time in history that the women drew a bigger audience. Breakout college stars helped ignite this explosion of interest (see: “The Caitlin Clark Effect”), and now that those players are matriculating to the WNBA, that league is also smashing records all over the place. The WNBA is seeing its biggest crowds since the league was founded in 1996 and viewership is popping off the charts, with 54 million unique viewers during the 2024 season, up 170 percent from the previous year. Women’s b-ball is clocking similar spikes in social media engagement and merch sales, and earlier this summer, the WNBA announced three new teams, in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

This momentum is also fueled by the recent breakthrough success of women’s sports at large. In 2024, women’s sports brought in more than $1 billion in revenue, and in a survey by sports-marketing firm Parity, 73 percent of respondents said they watch women’s sports at least a few times a year—just 8 percent less than the 81 percent who watch men’s sports. (We’re still not over how satisfying it is to see men wearing Clark jerseys.) Of course, Glamour has long championed female athletes, including sharing the stories of women who’ve contributed to basketball’s meteoric rise. Angel Reese was a 2023 Glamour College Woman of the Year, before she joined the WNBA’s historic superstar rookie class alongside Caitlin Clark. We gave star Liberty point guard Sabrina Ionescu a platform for debunking women’s basketball myths (and also interviewed her back in 2020, before she went pro). Recently, we covered Serena Williams investment in the Toronto Tempo, the first non-U.S. team in the WNBA. (And our support of women’s basketball is nothing new: The 1996 U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team (whose popularity helped pave the way for the WNBA, which launched the following year) won all eight of their games—and they were collectively named Glamour Women of the Year that year. Early WNBA star Lisa Leslie—the first player to dunk in a WNBA game—was a 2010 Woman of the Year.)

We’ve also been tracking the cultural impact that women’s basketball stars are making off the court. We’ve delved into how the women of the WNBA have led the way for activism in sports, putting their careers on the line for change. (Not to mention modeling what it looks like to be high-powered working moms.) We’ve marked the WNBA draft red carpet on our fashion calendar, and regularly chronicle players’ street style. (See: Caitlin Clark’s Prada leather jacket in Indiana-Fever red.) And in one unmistakable sign of just how mainstream women’s basketball culture has become, we welcomed New York Liberty mascot Ellie the Elephant to the 2024 Glamour Women of the Year red carpet.

Needless to say, there couldn’t be a better moment to share that Glamour ’s recent uptick in WNBA coverage is part of a partnership with Eli Lilly that celebrates female athletes while spotlighting the importance of early breast cancer screening. The Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company is, fittingly, the official sponsor of the Indiana Fever and its star player, Clark. And in a particularly clever move, the company also sponsored the first women’s college basketball All-Star combine during the NCAA women’s Final Four tournament earlier this year and dressed all 30 WNBA draft prospects in number 99 jerseys. It was a powerful way to call attention to a statistic from the American Cancer Society: There’s a 99-percent five-year relative survival rate for breast cancer when it’s detected early and hasn’t spread beyond the breast.

Their efforts will continue during WNBA All-Star Weekend, where Glamour and Lilly are working together to put women’s health squarely in the middle of current cultural conversations. Using wildly popular women’s sports events as a venue for promoting early breast cancer detection? I can only think of one phrase to sum up this collab: a slam dunk.

Originally Appeared on Glamour