You ever heard of Dick, Kerr's Ladies? They once drew 53,000 to Goodison Park to see them play St Helens. It's a hell of a story. Someone wrote a book about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick,_Kerr's_Ladies
Then they got crapped on and we were left with this stupid cultural idea that there's some sports that girls Just Can't Do, and what they can do is inherently lesser than what men can do. Thing is, you can't properly judge that unless the potential talent pool in any given sport is similar. Otherwise, of course the standard of play is going to look silly and lopsided, because the smaller your talent pool is, the smaller the chance of finding people with the right combination of attributes to be successful.
Overturn the cultural bias, increase the talent pool, increase the quality of play. How do you do that? Model as many examples as possible of women playing sport. Take them seriously. Give them comparable attention to the men. It'll take a generation, but down the road you'll have a product that's improved by several orders of magnitude because it'll look like elite competition. And, if it's more acceptable for women to play sport, then of course it becomes more acceptable for them to watch as well.
It doesn't have to be at a point where a women's team could beat a men's team in direct competition; they just have to look like skilled athletes and then the product will, given adequate opportunity, sell itself in the same way that athletics and tennis do, and women's football used to. And it's not like the intermediate stages are going to be universally played out in front of a crowd of three grannies and a family of loud crickets, either.
This does mean making people do things they might not feel like doing, but if we never did that then we'd still be sending kids up chimneys.
