Beginning with the 2025 NCAA Tournament, women’s college basketball will finally receive financial “units,” just as the men’s teams have for years. Units are multi-million dollar payments the NCAA awards to conferences based on the number of games a given team plays in the March Madness tournament.

The unanimous vote by NCAA membership (292-0) was met with applause in the jam-packed ballroom at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. It was the final step toward a pay structure after the Division I Board of Governors voted for the proposal in August.

“I can’t tell you how excited we are to have an opportunity to run with it,” NCAA president Charlie Baker said.

Public outcry against this disparity (among many others) between the men’s and women’s basketball teams began in the wake of the 2021 Kaplan Report. That report outlined several gender disparity issues that had existed for years in NCAA sports but became particularly obvious after the 2021 NCAA Tournament, which was played in a bubble in San Antonio for the women and in Indianapolis for the men.

The NCAA acted quickly to amend some of these differences, bringing the women’s tournament to 68 games like the men’s tournament by adding four play-in games and allowing women to use March Madness as branding for the NCAA Tournament.

Calls for unit payments got even louder after the NCAA and ESPN signed an eight-year, $920 million deal for 40 championships, including women’s basketball. The NCAA said it valued the women’s NCAA Tournament as a $60-million-per-year entity. With that money flowing into the women’s tournament — which had often been criticized as a “money loser” for the NCAA in comparison to the men’s tournament — coaches, players and stakeholders called on the NCAA to act quickly in amending this gender disparity.

“It’s another step toward incentivizing more investment in the game at the college level,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “More revenue distributed to more schools will only accelerate the growth of the sport.”

For years, on the men’s side, 132 units (one for each team in each game it plays) have been awarded to conferences of tournament teams. Those payments stretch out over six years and are awarded to the team’s respective conference, which can distribute the money as it sees fit. Last season, each unit was worth roughly $2 million apiece, meaning the ACC — which had a surprise run to the Final Four by the NC State men — received $34 million.

Without units, the NC State women’s team, which also made a run to the Final Four like its men’s team, received no money for the ACC.

But now, that will change. In the initial year of the Women’s Basketball Fund, $15 million will be distributed over three years (across 132 units), meaning a team that makes the Final Four this season will earn nearly $1.3 million for its conference, paid out over the next three years. That fund will grow to $25 million by 2028. It’s still lower than the total value of the men’s units, which are worth more than $200 million.

“This is such an important next step for our growing game,” UCLA coach Cori Close said. “I think we are just scratching the surface of the financial asset that women’s basketball can be for our institutions. I am very thankful for the work that went into this and I am ever more excited for the springboard this can be for future increases and growth.”

For many, this is a great but long-overdue step for women’s basketball.

Atlantic-10 commissioner Bernadette McGlade was the chair of the women’s basketball committee in 1999 and 2000. In 2000, that committee became the first to work on a proposal for unit distribution, however, when it was sent to NCAA leadership, it didn’t gain the traction needed. They worked hard to lobby it through leadership, but McGlade said that membership wasn’t ready to acknowledge the women’s tournament in that way at the time.

Twenty-five years later, McGlade was elated to be in the room on Wednesday to vote yes and see unanimous consent among NCAA membership.

“I’m certainly thrilled that I’m not retired yet and had the opportunity to vote for it,” McGlade said. “It’s long overdue, but I don’t think people can worry about that, because now that it’s passed, and it will change the future.”

The women’s NCAA Tournament is coming off its most successful postseason ever. The national title game between South Carolina and Iowa drew 18.9 million viewers, outdrawing the men’s title game for the first time in history.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Men's College Basketball, Sports Business, Women's College Basketball

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