The Gender Divide

At almost all levels of competition...

female endurance athletes compete separately from their male teammates. For a majority of these events, the men will compete for a longer period of time, and over a greater distance, than the women. They will compete for more sponsors, greater airtime, and more prize money than the women. 

Media Coverage

It's just a given at this point: women's sports don't make it to air. While NBC airs many cycling races over the course of the year, there are few clips, if any, of a women's race among their collection, even though many races are run with both genders.

A History of Less

Road Cycling was added to the Olympic program in 1896.
The first running of the modern marathon event took place at the 1908 Summer Olympics.
Nordic skiing was in the very first Winter Olympiad in 1924.

Women entered the Nordic program in 1952.
The AAU permitted women to enter all sanctioned marathons in 1972, six years after Bobbi Gibb snuck her way in to Boston.
Connie Carpenter and Joan Benoit won the first ever women's Olympic Road Cycling and Olympic Marathon events in 1984.

Elite women's sports have almost always drawn less attention than the equivalent male sport. But women's endurance sports share a unique pain. Whereas many female athletes compete a similar number of times per year (or more, whether or not those competitions get covered), elite female cyclists have to get by with having between 1/5 and 1/4 the available events per season, although that number has been getting slightly better in recent years.  Up until recently, even in the Olympic games were female endurance athletes allowed to compete.

A place on the line

Throughout the history of sport, female athletes have always been fighting to have their spot on the team. For years they have heard that they don't deserve one because they don't work as hard, or that they aren't big or strong enough for sport. For endurance athletes, though, it especially hits home. The biggest and strongest isn't always the best at Nordic Skiing or Running, and much of the time it is the one who figures out how to do the least amount of work in a cycling race who wins. 
They are presented with smaller competitions, almost as a consolation prize for wanting to compete, and it takes an effort to get onto the global stage.

Proving their worth

In order for change to happen, someone needs to be the spark. Kathryn Bertine documented her challenges trying to qualify as a female cyclist for an Olympic Games in her book "The Road Less Taken," and followed it up with a documentary "Half the Road: The Passions, Pitfalls, and Power of Women's Professional Cycling." Bertine shared her experiences, and at the same time the experiences of many female professional cyclists, in travelling around the world in search of an opportunity that is there one minute, but not the next.

Bobbi Gibb and Kathy Switzer proved that women could run the marathon by defiantly running in Boston in 1966 and 67.

And as of the last few years, Kikkan Randall and Kristin Armstrong of Team USA, and Marit Bjorgen of Team Norway, are proving that you can still be a top athlete while being a mom.  

Towards the future

All there is to do is go forward from here.
Prove that women's sports are worth the broadcast hours and sponsorship dollars. 
The vicious cycle of the media not covering women's sports because the competition is too soft because nobody's getting paid because the sponsors aren't here because there isn't any media coverage will eventually break. We just need to break it.  

The Female Perspective

When women's sports are broadcast, announcers tend to spend more time discussing women's personal lives (spouses, children, hobbies and education) than they do for the men. 

Bertine highlights this by calling out Bicycling Magazine for a 2011 poll where they asked which of five riders was the hottest female cyclist: 

"None of them pictured a cyclist in the heat of competition; most of the photos were glamour shots, and all of the cyclists are inarguably beautiful, wonderful women. ... Three of the women in Bicycling's hottie poll - Britain's Victoria Pendleton, the U.S.'s Dotsie Bausch, and Sweden's Emilia Fahlin - are so much more than beautiful faces. They are an Olympian, a world-record setter, and a national champion, respectively." - The Road Less Taken, "The Watties"

This is very typical of publications talking about women's sports. There have been multiple studies focusing on Sports Illustrated magazine and other publications that show a consistent (but evolving) pattern of trivializing and sexualizing women in sport.

"For example, a 1959 profile of former swimmer Esther Williams, who later became a Hollywood film star, included her 38-25-35 inch measurements. A 1969 profile of skier Annie Famose noted her 'catch me, kiss me haircut'. A 1974 story on basketball player Hazel Walker included a description of her as 'about the sexiest thing I'd ever seen'." - "Yes, but how many tattoos does she have?" Mary Jollimore

Recent publications and broadcasts have been better, but even still there are differences. A study of a section of the 2008 Summer Olympic media guide provided by the IOC found that female profiles on average contained 55% more personal information than male profiles, including more hobbies, and have longer profiles highlighting them more as women than as athletes (Carter).

Live Coverage

In 2015, the UCI broadcast just over 151 hours of the ten Women's WorldTour events to a global audience. While there are no direct figures for the men's events, if you take just the three Grand Tour events (Giro d'Italia, Le Tour de France, La Vuelta de España, 63 total days of racing) and air just the last two hours of each stage, 126 hours have aired in just three events. If every WorldTour race received just two hours of coverage (which is a low estimate, many spring races receive closer to three and a half), the total men's broadcast time comes to just under 600 hours per year.

Eurosport broadcasts most every cycling event and Nordic ski race each year, but the difference in coverage is quite large. For Nordic, they will air both genders events in almost their entirety, airing in total over 100 hours of Nordic skiing in four months.

Not Just Live

On streaming sites such as YouTube, you can find replays of entire broadcasts and highlights for Track and Field, Cross Country running, Nordic Skiing, and Cycling events. Some of these are located on official channels run by the sport governing body, while others are on channels of people who just love the sport and want others to enjoy it as well. Users have taken notice that where there are full replays of men's events on an official channel, in some cases only a short highlight reel is played for the women.

Competitive Opportunity

While not as much an issue at collegiate levels, elite female athletes may find difficulty finding as many opportunities to compete as their male teammates.

Nordic Skiing

At the most elite level, Nordic skiing is very gender equal. The number of athletes per gender each nation is allowed to send to each race is determined by a qualification standard and a team quota, and in many cases has resulted in more female athletes competing for a country than male.
And while each World Cup weekend is dual gender, each gender races a different distance, where in some cases the women will race only half the distance the men do in any given race.

Cycling

At the WorldTour level, cycling still has a few problems when it comes to equal competitive opportunity. Women's races are drastically shorter than the men's races, teams are significantly smaller, and there are less than half as many racing days for women as there are for men. And it trickles down.

Running

The most equal of the three, elite endurance (or for that matter, any) running events, whether it's a track meet, marathon, or cross country event, see men and women competing at the same distance more than 90% of the time.
Currently, the only differences in race distances are at the sub-Senior levels of cross country events, where international junior women compete over a 6km race, and junior men over 8km. This is also seen at the NCAA level in the United States, where women mostly compete at either 5km or 6km, and men at 8km or 10km.

Prize Money, Salaries, and Sponsorships

In the American workplace, the wage gap between female and male employees is right around 17 percent. In elite sport, your pay largely depends on sponsorships. While prize money and salary in Nordic Skiing and Track and Field are largely equal, in Cycling, there is much work to be done.

While FIS and the IAAF have done well in equalizing the prize monies given out at major events, the UCI still has minimum payouts for races that are widely different between the two genders. At the highest level, the entirety of the prize money given out to the women's field is less than half of what the male winner of an event will receive

Cracks in the Road

The pro peloton for women is rough when it comes to earning any sort of money. According to a 2013 survey by the Women's Cycling Association, 50% of 'professional' female cyclists (with professional in this case meaning licensed to a professional team) earned less than $3,000 per year from their salaries. With such a low racing wage, many female cyclists opt to continue working close to full time in order to supplement their racing income. Three-time US Road Cycling Champion Megan Guarnier signed her first "pro" contract in 2008, but had to continue working upwards of 30 hours per week, on top of her racing and training commitments, in order to make ends meet in 2012.

Although salaries are low, athletes can still supplement their salary by placing well in races. In a one day race, the minimum prize money for the women's winner is 1,150€. While results are largely based on individual efforts, cycling is a team sport. Unfortunately that means that the prize money is more often than not going to be split evenly among the team riders and support staff, so with a team of 8 plus staff counting as one more, the 'winner' really only takes home a little under 130€ from her victory.

Amateur Hour

Thankfully, these types of inequalities are being seen and heard by local race organizers in the US, and more and more amateur events are highlighting equal prize money for both genders. USA Cycling, as a part of their National Road Calendar and their Pro Road Tour, requires race organizers to provide equal or equitable prize purses for each gender and age group. It all has to start somewhere

The Sponsor Commitment

One big issue with the lack of salaries at the women's professional level is that sponsors are a large player in paying athletes. Because women's cycling doesn't draw as much exposure as men's, sponsors aren't willing to commit to as much funding as they should.