This year’s football season brings an historic first: Beth Mowins became the first female play-by-play commentator for an NFL telecast.
We were curious to find out how this moment in sports history would be received, so we used SurveyMonkey Audience to ask people their opinions on the role of women in football.
It was a part of a larger study that SurveyMonkey partnered with FiveThirtyEight to complete: finding out who Americans say are their top and least favorite teams in the NFL, and looking at how each team’s fans lean politically. So how do Americans feel about women in football? Let’s tackle some of the results:
1. When asked what roles they see women playing in the sport and business of football, their answers were relatively high-powered from a business perspective. The top three roles were: 1) Owner (68%) 2) Reporter (68%), and 3) Team executive (64%). When it comes to the question of women as players, only 28% of people said they want to see women on the gridiron. Millennials are the most on-board with women on the field (42% Millennials overall and 46% of Millennial women said so).
2. When it comes to coaching, most people say women would perform about the same or better than men (72%), and Millennial women feel this way the most (80%). On the other hand, 35% of male respondents think female coaches would perform worse than men, while 40% of men 65+ think women cannot compare as coaches.
3. The vast majority of people (86%) say women would be just as good or better at calling the game as a commentator than men; 92% of Millennial women say just as good or better than men. Meanwhile only 12% of Millennial men say women would be worse than men, 22% of their senior (65+) counterparts say women would be worse as commentators. [Note from the sidelines: this survey was conducted before Beth made her first call of the game.]
Curious what people think about how Beth is doing now? Try sending them a survey to ask them yourself.
Methodology: This SurveyMonkey Audience survey was conducted online from September 1-7, 2017 among a national sample of adults ages 18 and older. For team favorability ratings, each respondent who is a fan or casual fan then rated 10 of the 32 NFL teams at random. Respondents for this survey were selected from the nearly 3 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Topline and demographic breakdowns of the findings can be found here.
