Consumption of women’s sports: insights from a latent profile analysis across four countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Women’s sports have recently grown, marking a change in the sports industry and a major cultural transformation, with gender roles being redefined. Using social role theory, this research comprehensively explored profiles associated with the consumption of women’s sports, focusing on consumption behavior, fandom, desire for equity, visibility, and promotion, with cross-country comparisons. Design/methodology/approach A panel of 1,671 adults from France (n = 405), South Africa (n = 365), Quebec (Canada) (n = 502), and the United Kingdom (n = 399) took part in an online multinational cross-sectional survey. Findings The latent profile analysis identified four groups. Profile 1 “Indifferent to Women’s Sports and Gender Equity” shows no interest in women’s sports and little concern for equity. Profile 2 “Indifferent to Women’s Sports but Gender Equity-Conscious” lacks interest in women’s sports but cares about equity issues. Profile 3 “Slightly Interested in Women’s Sports and Gender Equity-Conscious” shows mild interest in women’s sports and cares about equity. Profile 4 “Interested in Women’s Sports and Supporter of Gender Equity” is actively interested in women’s sports and attaches a great deal of importance to gender equity. Profile distribution varies by country, with notable differences in how supporting women’s sports influences brand perception. Originality/value This study is among the few to explore the consumption of women’s sports holistically and from a multinational perspective. Notably, it employs latent profile analysis—an analytical method rarely applied in this context—offering deeper insights into consumer segmentation. It highlights how consumption profiles shape brand perception, providing valuable marketing insights for brands supporting gender equity initiatives. Ultimately, these findings contribute to advancing women’s sports and promoting greater gender equity in sport.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".