Does NIL diminish gender equity in sports?

Just two years ago, in June 2021, college sports saw one of its most dramatic changes since Title IX of the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1972 to ensure gender equity in athletics. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) loosened restrictions on student-athlete compensation by permitting them to monetize their name, image, and likeness (NIL).  These rights mark significant progress in student-athlete rights. However, it is necessary to examine if who really benefits from this. My research examines whether NIL benefits male and female athletes equally, with an overarching question asking if certain forms of NIL compensation should be regulated by Title IX in order to ensure gender-equity efforts continue in collegiate athletics.

To study this, I looked at the role of NIL collectives in the Power-5 Conferences. NIL collectives are third-party organizations that fundraise to facilitate NIL deals for student-athletes at a specific institution. As external partners of a university, they typically pool funds from donors, corporate sponsors, and fans to drive opportunities for student-athletes. Many of the “big deals” are coming from NIL collectives, typically ranging from $20,000-$200,000; there are even multi-million deals being made between athletes and collectives. Previous literature on this topic estimated that a quarter of the compensation from NIL collectives goes to football players alone.

Because of their strategic involvement with an athletic department, I wanted to uncover if Title IX should be expanded to impact the benefits student-athletes receive from of NIL collectives. Title IX was not written specifically for athletics, but it is applied in college athletics because all facets of a federally funded educational institution are required to have compliant efforts to promote gender equity. It is applied to athletics by mandating that the male and female makeup of the student-athlete population is representative of the general student-body, with proportionate scholarship funding, and effective accommodation of the athletic interests and ability of the student-body. Additionally, it requires equal treatment of student-athletes in athletically related benefits and opportunities. The benefit most relevant to NIL is publicity (and marketing).

While collectives technically operate outside of a university, they act in direct support of the student-athlete population often with coordinated involvement from the university they represent. The strength of their relationship to an athletic department, and the new importance of NIL in college athletics drive my question of if these organizations should be similarly required to provide equal benefits to male and female student-athletes. And if not, do universities have the ability to actively play a role in supporting more equal NIL benefits for student-athletes.

In my study, I chose 38 NIL collectives, using a convenience sample of collectives with available information on the athletes they support through NIL compensation. While there are more than 100 NIL collectives associated with Power-5 schools, only 38 publish the information needed for this study. Out of the 1,748 student-athletes benefiting from these collectives, 73.21% of the NIL deals were made with males and 26.79% with females. This is substantially different than the student-athletes and student-body populations of the 30 schools these collectives represent. All together, 55.75% of the student-athletes at the schools studied are male and 44.25% are female

With almost an 18% over representation of male athletes in NIL collectives, these entities do not uphold the Title IX requirements for substantially proportional representation of male and female student-athletes. This information alone is helpful to see that collectives are not currently upholding the values of gender equity set forth by Title IX. I argue that NIL collectives should be held to a similar standard as the athletic department they represent. Additionally, as NIL is a new and essential benefit in college-athletics, Title IX should be strengthened to support equity in all aspects of collegiate sports.

A commonly questioned issue with Title IX is that it has diminished opportunities for “non-revenue” generating sports. NIL collectives also similarly underrepresent “non-revenue” or Olympic sports. Only 35% of the Olympic sport student-athletes earning compensation from NIL collectives are male and 65% are female. While I believe it is necessary to utilize Title IX to strengthen aggregate gender equity benefits from collectives, but this should not be implemented without also considering ways to mitigate the negative impact it could have for “non-revenue” generating sports.

Finally, I recognized two other ways to support female athlete NIL opportunities through my research, utilizing univariate correlation analysis between NIL frequency and university spending decisions. Both female sport game-day operating expenses and total program expenses have positive correlations with female NIL opportunities in collectives (0.1163, 0.0182). This suggests that increasing investment in female sports programs could have a positive impact on NIL potential for female student-athletes.

By studying the media reach of male and female sports, male athletes overall have a larger media reach. I calculated the media impact of each sport using the following scale to rank the exposure of each game played by the athletes in this study.

In this study, male sports had an average media impact of 2.2016 and female sports had an average of 1.6684. Both male and female NIL frequency in collectives had a strong, positive correlation with media impact (0.6824, 0.6095), suggesting that media exposure has a large impact on the NIL benefits afforded to athletes. To create equality in NIL opportunities, universities should push external media platforms to provide female student-athletes with equal sport broadcasting opportunities.

While it may be politically unfeasible, a Title IX policy update might be the fastest approach to cresting equal opportunities for male and female athletes in NIL collectives.  Universities may also have the ability to influence gender equity in NIL by increasing their investment in female athletic programs. Finally, large media outlet should understand their responsibility in drive unequal opportunities for male and female athletes and gradually shift to enhanced media exposure opportunities for female athletes.

Margaret Rogers is a senior at the O’Neill School in Public and Environmental Affairs.