Emma Rodriguez-Ayala, the general counsel and chief administrative officer at Ariel Investments—a Chicago-based firm with $13.5 billion in assets under management—spent a healthy chunk of 2024 delving into the analytics of women’s sports. What she and her colleagues found was compelling. Given the recent viewership and attendance increases, media rights for leagues like the WNBA and National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) are tremendously undervalued. Once the leagues renegotiate these contracts and secure more lucrative agreements—like men’s sports leagues did a little over a decade ago—franchise prices should skyrocket.

To supplement this deep dive, Rodriguez-Ayala, 43, also relied on the old-fashioned eye test. It’s easy to spot, for example, the girls and boys lining up at professional basketball and volleyball games, hoping to get autographs from the players. “The most exciting thing,” says Rodriguez-Ayala, “is to see our society change in real time.”

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