This summer, Canada will host the seventh women’s football World Cup and the tournament will mark something of a milestone in terms of media coverage. The BBC announced in November that they will be broadcasting every game across the BBC Two and BBC Three channels, as well as on their Red Button service and on the BBC Sport website.

Such an announcement indicated a clear step-change from the arrangements in place for the previous edition of the women’s World Cup, which was held in Germany in 2011. Over the course of that tournament, all but one of the 32 matches played were only available to watch on the BBC Sport website or on the Red Button. Only the final was broadcast live on an actual channel – Japan vs the United States found its way onto BBC Three.

2011 World Cup winners - caught on camera Tony Quinn

The amount of exposure women’s football can expect to receive this summer has undoubtedly increased in light of such broadcasting plans. However, placed alongside the level of coverage and indeed interest – for the decisions of television executives are influenced by the perceived public appetite – in the men’s football World Cup, it remains abundantly clear that the women’s equivalent still receives a fraction of the attention.

The 2015 women’s World Cup may well prove to be the spark that sees the next edition of the event make the breakthrough of commanding a place in the programming of the flagship BBC One channel. However, the fact remains that we still see women’s sport on the national broadcaster’s premier channel only when women compete at the same events as men – Wimbledon and the Olympics are the two most obvious examples and, even there, the biggest events are the ones in which men compete.

I have already mentioned the two factors of coverage and interest: they are both important in trying to fathom why women’s sport receives substantially less attention than men’s does. In prospect, we have a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario. To an extent the level of coverage is influenced by the level of perceived interest and yet the interest of the public is, of course, to a large extent determined by the level of exposure brought by coverage.

You can throw sponsorship into the mix as well. Sportswomen receive far less revenue from sponsors than their male counterparts, which is understandable considering that sportswomen represent a relatively poorer investment because of the level of exposure they’ll get. Without sponsorship revenue, women’s sports struggle to grow and while they struggle to grow they struggle to get much exposure. A number of forces are involved here, none of them purely a cause or an effect.

The oft-heard argument about why women’s sports is less popular than men’s amongst the public is that people want to watch the best sportspeople performing at the highest possible level and the ‘fact’ is that men are simply better able to compete at a higher level than women by virtue of being supposedly stronger, faster etc. A look at the Olympic records for track and field events would appear to suffice in support this argument – men are invariable faster, stronger or just better at whatever event is in question.

However, I intend to take issue with the argument on the grounds that its core assertion – that men’s bodies are biologically constructed in such a way that enables them to perform better than women – betrays a misunderstanding of what it means to perform better.

I have always seen athletics (to use the same example as before) as athletes not only competing against one another but against the limitations of the human body. The argument that men are physically different in a way that makes them better athletes makes very clear the fact that this is something of a generalisation. We ought to instead view male athletes as competing against the limitations of the male body and view female athletes as competing against the limitations of the female body. For men and women are, clearly, physiologically different.

It is always fun to speculate whether someone will ever run the 100 metre sprint in sub-nine seconds, but such speculation assumes, almost certainly correctly, that there is a lower bound of the duration of time it is possible for the human – or rather, male or female – body to travel 100 metres. It also stands to reason that that minimum duration is not the same for the male body or the female body.

Surely then, level of performance ought to be understood in terms of how close to that lower bound an athlete can reach. Usain Bolt has run 100 metres in 9.58 seconds, 0.91 seconds faster than the female world record holder, Florence Griffith Joyner, but what’s to say that the minimum time a woman can run 100 metres in is not simply 0.91 seconds more than the minimum time in which a man can run the same distance? Joyner may even be closer to that lowest attainable time than Bolt is and so, in a way (I would argue, the most important way) she has outperformed Bolt.

Pushing themselevs to the limit? Marc

I recognise that this argument could be figured as patronising, suggesting that women ought to aspire to less in sport, but what I’m actually trying to suggest is that we all, as spectators, misunderstand what it is to perform at the highest level and so if the reason for being less interested in women’s sports is wanting to see the highest level performances, I fear we are dismissing women’s sports on false grounds.

Of course, there are other reasons why women’s sports receive less attention. Whether it’s because they are somehow more competitive or because sport typically plays a more prominent role in their upbringing, men dominate the audience for sport. Without delving too deeply into the gender politics of it, this fact alone leads us to another reason why women’s sport sits in the shadow of men’s sport.

The idea of the players on the pitch having a relationship, even a resemblance, to the people on the terraces is one that is batted around a lot in football and it perhaps speaks to an underlying truth of sport – we want to watch someone who is, to an extent, like us. Don’t most little boys want to become their favourite footballer when they grow up? If this is the case and if the audience for sport is mostly male then the appetite will naturally be for men’s sport.

Furthermore, sports owe much of their popularity to their personalities. Men’s football has always had a huge cast of heroes and villains, for example, but when it comes to women’s football, the same just isn’t true. Names such as Marta spring to mind but it’s quite possible that women’s sport receive less attention because sportswomen haven’t been able to transcend their sports in the same way many sportsmen have been able to.

The sports that have produced these kinds of female personalities – for instance, the Williams sisters in tennis and more recently Ronda Rousey in mixed martial arts – have seen far more attention in the women’s form of the sport than sports which have thus far failed to produced such ‘celebrities’.

Superwomen Marianne Bevis

All of this paints a picture that makes it hard to argue that women’s sport inexplicably receives less attention than men’s sport. There are a whole host of reasons for it but regardless of the reason, it is interesting to consider whether women’s sports should receive less attention. Should this summer’s World Cup in Canada receive the same level of clamour that last summer’s World Cup in Brazil did?

For me, the answer is yes, but with a couple of important corollaries. The first is that many things that should be the case simply are not; so to expect women’s sport to suddenly acquire an all-adoring public overnight on the basis of some kind of rectitude is naïve. More important than that however, is that we can’t just focus on one side of the television screen or the advertising hoardings here. The entire sports-world is male-dominated and quite clearly, unless we accept that sport is an inherently male thing that men are better at, the female sports viewership needs to be nurtured.

This isn’t to say that men should watch men’s sport while women watch women’s sport but that sport, like any other kind of entertainment, is shaped by and is representative of its audience. While securing funding (be it from sponsors or government), consciously broadening media coverage and other such pursuits are hugely important, perhaps what is paramount for women’s sport is to continue to de-gender the importance of sport culturally both as a child and as an adult.