Play Matters. Be a fan of Women’s Basketball (and sex equality). Fill out your brackets – and tune in.

By Laura Pappano

Here’s an experiment you can do at home: Google “March Madness” and see how many entries actually mention a women’s championship. Just about any place you click, March Madness is talking about one playoff – and it’s all about the guys.

Even the NCAA site takes some navigating to get to the women’s play, while the men’s pops right up. The difficulty is only compounded if you actually want to watch the women’s games. The NCAA site offers a “Podcast Central” and “Post Game Central” for the men while the women’s side offers a PDF of printed remarks from a March 16 press conference. Come on, guys, is this for real?

Let’s hope the CBS College Sports All-Access (the video tab on the NCAA site) adds some of the D1 women’s programming to its schedule in the next few days.

The crux of the problem, of course, is that all of those office pools, online-bracket contests – and all the water-cooler yammering, friendly texting, and TV-watching – is all about the men’s contest because (SUPRPRISE!) most folks bet on the men’s games.

It’s time to change that.

Start your own office/workplace contest for the women’s 2009 “March to the Arch.” You can do it online or score it by hand. Download the bracket here, get your friends to fill it out and get it to you before play begins on Saturday. There are several ways to score, but one approach:

The winner will be selected based on a system of points awarded during each around for correct picks: Participants will be awarded one point for each victory correctly predicted in the first round, two points for each victory correctly predicted in the second round, three points for each victory correctly predicted in the third round, four points for each victory correctly predicted in the fourth round, five points for each victory correctly predicted in the fifth round and 10 points for correctly selecting the national champion. The winner of the contest will be the person with the most points.

Print out that bracket, pass it out, and start talking about the women’s games and post your comments here. This is not just about sports. It’s about women’s power and status. This is a political act!