March Madness and the weak excuse

This week's top stories: Over 190 U.S. firms urged Congress to pass paid family leave. Australia is seeing growing criticism of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's failure to address sexual violence and inequality. Concerns are increasing in Hungary where the government is cracking down on the LGBTQ community, and companies are fighting back.     There's always an excuse. When Stanford sports performance coach Ali Kersher posted photos to Instagram comparing the long rows of dumbbells, barbells and bench presses that made up the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament weight room with a small pile of yoga mats and six sets of dumbbells (that's right, six) provided to the Women's Basketball Tournament, the NCAA explained  the discrepancy was "due to limited space."  That explanation didn't make sense to Sedona Prince, a forward for the University of Oregon's women's team. In a TikTok video, Prince panned from those six sets of dumbbells over to what appeared to be half of a basketball court not in use. "Here's all this extra space," she pointed out. Soon female players and coaches were highlighting other differences in the NCAA's treatment of its men's and women's tournaments: the quality of the food and the free swag given to players. One of the more inexplicable differences was in the puzzles gifted to players. Men received a 500-piece puzzle. Women, a 150-piece set. This time, the NCAA explained that the disparity in gifts was because of "the weather."  ​ Source: instagram.com/kershner.ali/ ​ ​ Source: instagram.com/kershner.ali/ ​   The men's basketball tournament is the NCAA's primary money maker, of course. According to the Wall Street Journal, CBS pays nearly $1 billion a year for broadcast rights to the men's tournament, while ESPN pays an estimated $35 million a year for the women's. This is a common explanation for female athletes' relegation to second class status: they just don't bring in the money. That argument falls apart in the few instances when women do generate more revenue. In the years after they won the 2015 World Cup, the U.S. women's soccer team brought in more revenue for the U.S. Soccer Federation than the men's team but were still paid less. When the team sued, USSF acknowledged that yes, they were more profitable. But, it explained, their contracts were structured differently.  The NCAA owns the trademarked "March Madness" and the term extends to women's games; the NCAA could call the Women's Tournament "March Madness." But for some reason it doesn't. I reached out to the NCAA to find out why but didn't get a response. The decision is odd considering women's college basketball is growing in popularity. At some schools, women's games have started selling as well as men's, and in 2019, 3.6 million people watched the women's championship match on ESPN, a 24% rise over 2016. That's still considerably lower than the men's Final Four ratings, but at the time ESPN had only been airing women's games regionally. This year is the first time the Women's Tournament will be broadcast nationally. Most of the Women's Tournament will take place at the Alamodome, home to UT San Antonio's football team, while the official "March Madness" will be played in stadiums in and around Indianapolis. The final rounds of the Men's Tournament will be held at Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts, on two courts that the NCAA named Equality and Unity as a reflection, it said, of its "commitment to inclusion and social justice."  - Claire Suddath Follow Us Get the newsletter By the Numbers The richest 1% of U.S. households saw their net worth rise by some $4 trillion in 2020, meaning that they captured about 35% of the extra wealth generated nationwide, according to the latest quarterly study of household wealth from the Federal Reserve. The poorest half of the population, by contrast, got about 4% of overall gains. Widening wealth gaps during the pandemic have become a key driver of policy for President Joe Biden's administration, cited by officials as a reason for the proposed tax increases on high-income groups. Before You Go Vaccine passports are coming, raising fears of a two-tier world. A girl grows up on food stamps and becomes an engineer. New research shows why. Black farm owners lost nearly all of their land over the last century. Here's how they took on the racial wealth gap.   Like getting the Bloomberg Equality newsletter? Subscribe to Bloomberg.com for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and gain expert analysis from exclusive subscriber-only newsletters. Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can't find anywhere else. Learn more.   You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Bloomberg Equality newsletter. Unsubscribe | Bloomberg.com | Contact Us Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022