For the 2021 tournaments, which strayed from their traditional formats because of the coronavirus pandemic, investigators found that N.C.A.A. executives felt that the men’s tournament was a priority for the organization’s survival after it had to cancel the competitions in 2020 and spiraled into a financial emergency. The “fundamental difference in perspective about the relative importance of the 2021 men’s and women’s championships led to gender disparities from the very outset of the planning process,” investigators wrote.
Organizers of the men’s tournament, for example, were allowed to announce their plans to proceed with the competition on Nov. 16, 2020, investigators said. But executives balked at allowing organizers of the women’s tournament to make a similarly timed announcement because they would first have to review the financial costs of holding the competition.
The men’s tournament, the report said, faced no such scrutiny.
Once the men arrived in Indiana and the women in Texas for their tournaments, investigators said, they had vastly different experiences. Food quality varied drastically, as did lounges for players and gift bags provided to participants. (The N.C.A.A. spent $125.55 per player in the first and second rounds of the men’s tournament on gifts; the association spent $60.42 per player in the early rounds at the women’s tournament.)
And investigators found that tournament organizers devoted far more resources to promoting the 2021 men’s tournament.
But the problems that trailed the women’s tournament were often years in the making, Kaplan’s team found. The N.C.A.A.’s system of distributing revenues, for instance, relies heavily on performance in the men’s tournament, but it does not consider performance in the women’s championship, effectively offering fewer incentives for universities to invest in their women’s basketball programs.
And the N.C.A.A. earns money from a corporate sponsorship arrangement that produces substantial revenue for men’s basketball in Division I. The system, the investigators wrote, requires a prospective sponsor to agree to support all N.C.A.A. championship events, closing off opportunities to companies with smaller marketing budgets.

Source: New York Times

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