It’s March and depending on who you ask, that might mean a number of different things: It’s finally spring, it’s time for the NCAA basketball tournaments or it’s Women’s History Month. Unfortunately, more often than not, fans of college basketball and their friends whom they pressure into March Madness neglect the women’s tournament, despite its action, drama and quality of play being at least equal to that on the men’s side.

For students at NC State this is twice as disappointing, since our women’s basketball team is currently a number three seed coming off a first-round victory against Maine, while our men’s team didn’t even make the tournament. We at Technician are in no way immune from this: Our bracket challenge only included the men’s tournament.

The NCAAs, while a prominent example, are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to gender inequality in college sports. According to a summary of NC State athletics’ budget, football and men’s basketball both generate more revenue for the department than all other sports combined, indicating that fans are investing far more money and attention into these sports than others.

This attention deficit feeds into a negative cycle, where less attention leads to less investment in the fan experience. While football competes in its own stadium at Carter-Finley and men’s basketball plays at the massive PNC Arena, women’s basketball is relegated to Reynolds Coliseum, which is far smaller and shared by four separate sports. This, in turn, makes it less appealing for fans to attend and show support.

That said, students can still reverse this trend by attending more women’s sporting events. If any women’s sports tickets saw the same level of demand as the top-tier men’s sports, the athletics department would undoubtedly consider expanding facilities to accommodate the additional excitement and turn it into more revenue.

Changing our mentality during college could also have impacts in society at large, which also suffers from a noted bias in favor of male athletes — exemplified by the massive pay gap in athletics.

According to a study in the Journal of Sport Behavior, college students tend to view sports as a masculine endeavor overall. This — combined with past research indicating that students tend to view those who participate in “gender-appropriate” sports as more desirable — means that there are strong social pressures in place to preserve our current, gendered understanding of sports, and the inequality it creates.

This study also found that media portrayals of sports are another large influence on people’s perceptions of their relationship to gender. While media companies can and should refocus their coverage on their own, college students can spur the process by following women’s teams and sharing content about them on social media.

All this is to say that students who care about sports and gender inequality can make a difference in how our university treats its female athletes. In doing so, they can also work toward changing the way society views athletes by pushing women’s athletics to the forefront of people’s attention. For now, we can cheer on the Pack in the NCAA Tournament and hope that they can bring home the title.