At 9.2%, 2024 is the highest share the study has recorded — and only half a point above where it stood in 1999. Twenty-five years of rising participation, professional leagues founded, Olympic golds and record attendance, to arrive back at a ceiling the study had already found. Across all eight waves men's sports never fall below 88% of airtime: the women's figure has moved between 1.6% and 9.2%, the men's has not meaningfully moved at all.

The more consequential finding is not the size of the number but where the coverage sits. Quality coverage of women's sport now exists, but it has been siloed — carried on emergent and niche platforms, while legacy networks stay on the men's "Big Three" and interrupt only when something rare or record-breaking happens. Women's sport is no longer ignored. It is compartmentalized, and coverage placed where only existing fans will find it does little to build new ones.

Overt sexism — the leering, the jokes at athletes' expense — has largely disappeared from sports news. What replaced it is not equality. Women's sports segments are shorter and stripped of what makes men's sports feel like an event: no excited voice, no colorful descriptors, no powerful adjectives, no build-up.

The research team named this gender-bland sexism. Coverage that is technically respectful and quietly communicates that nothing here matters much. It is harder to object to than the old version, and it does similar work.