Describing the ascent of women’s sports in 2024 can be summed up in one phrase: It’s not a moment, it’s a movement. As established and emerging leagues continue to build larger TV audiences and grow in-person attendance, marketers are somewhat playing catch-up in hopes of connecting to their target audiences.

Horizon Sports & Experiences hopes that its new study, “The Women’s Sports Opportunity,” speaks to those brand managers about how to engage that fandom. The payoff for those companies can be enormous as its research shows that 67% of women’s sports fans make a point to support brands that sponsor their favorite teams or athletes.

The study is the first in the company’s newly launched thought leadership series called “& Now,” and it comes three days before the inaugural Shark Beauty Women’s Champions Classic at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which HS&E launched in partnership with Fox Sports. In the Saturday primetime women’s doubleheader, Tennessee will face last year’s national championship runner-up Iowa followed by UConn taking on Louisville.

Sponsorships and other marketing activations in women’s sports are also on the rise, albeit growing from an incredibly low number in years past. Highlighting the opportunities in these events was HS&E’s reasoning behind developing the study, according to Kerry Bradley, the company’s senior vice president of strategy.

“The buzz around female athletes and women’s sports teams and leagues has never been greater,” Bradley said in a phone interview. “But the reality is that only 6% of Fortune 500 brands currently invest as women’s sports sponsors. While a handful of brands and agencies see and understand the opportunity, the vast majority still need help understanding this market and what it needs in terms of ROI potential.”

One of the takeaways of the study is that, to borrow from a popular T-shirt, everyone watches women’s sports, most especially men. According to the research, while 66% of the U.S. follows men’s sports and 25% follows women’s sports, the gender skew of those who identify as fans of both is the exactly the same—55% male, 45% female.

However, Bradley noted that the demographic shifts within both buckets have major differences. “The women’s sports fan base is more multicultural,” she said. “Based on our study, it’s 20% Black and 16% Hispanic, compared to 13% Black, 13% Hispanic on the men’s sports side.” Women’s sports, she added, are “effectively engaging the younger sort of tech savvy, social (media) savvy generations, but also captivating some of the older audiences who have real spending power.”

The study also reveals how women’s sports have already shown what the next generation of sports fandom looks like. While tech-savvy fans consume all sports, those who follow women’s sports more closely spend more time exploring the world around the athletes as opposed to die-hard fans of men’s sports who focus on debates over stats and performance. Brands can work in this “white space,” as Bradley called it, to engage with fans of women’s sports in a way that’s authentic to how they follow the athletes.

“There are only so many game days,” Bradley said. “It’s all of those moments in between where now you have these rich storytelling opportunities in women’s sports because these fans are hungry for it. They’re chronically online, and they are dialed in. They want to get to know these athletes on a more personal level. To be a brand that helps bring some of those stories to light is going to be great … in terms of lift and awareness and engagement because this audience is highly engaged on social and digital channels.”

Another potential benefit for marketers to connect with women’s sports fans comes from the relative youth of these competitions. With most women’s leagues being younger than their male counterparts—the NBA had a five-decade head start versus the WNBA, for example—there’s less brand clutter for interested marketers to compete against. There is also, for the time being, lower costs to get involved.

In late September, Shark Beauty signed on to be the title sponsor for the Women’s Champions Classic, making it one of the few female-focused brands to be the primary sponsor of a high-level sporting event. Though the Shark Beauty pact created with HS&E can appear to be a self-serving example, Bradley sees it as an ideal case of a brand exploring that “white space” since a beauty company would not have the same opportunities with the much older and entrenched male sports properties. The excitement around Shark Beauty’s involvement is that this isn’t another insurance company wrapping its arms around a sporting event.

“You’re seeing some beauty brands recognize that there’s this organic and endemic opportunity for them to show up and authentically market their products with these fantastic female athletes who are more effective in reaching audiences that are made up of their target consumers,” Bradley said.

“Right off the bat, you’re going to have people going ‘who or what is Shark Beauty?,’ and that’s exactly what you want as a brand marketer. You want to drive traffic to your website or to your channels, to not only increase engagement with your existing consumer base, but to raise awareness with new consumers as well.”

However, while there’s room for those endemic brands for now, other brands regardless of product, service or gender focus, will look to increase engagement with their customers through women’s sports—especially as the businesses of women’s leagues and competitions mature.

“There’s a tremendous opportunity to show up in sports and to engage this highly engaged and passionate audience,” Bradley said. “But that white space won’t be there forever. There’s an opportunity for brands to capitalize, but that window will close.”