Displayed alongside lacy sports bras and flared sweat pants, Cowboys underwear is one of many offerings at the stadium’s Victoria’s Secret Pink store, the first to open inside a sports complex.

The move is emblematic of a broader marketing effort by the N.F.L. to engage female fans, who make up a rising share of the league’s base.

“We clearly get that our female fans are our consumers,” said Charlotte Jones Anderson, a Cowboys’ executive vice president, who pushed hard to get a Pink store inside the stadium. “They’re really the ones that make our business tick.”

In recent years, the N.F.L. surpassed the N.B.A. and Major League Baseball in the share of its regular-season viewers who are female, according to Nielsen. More women watched the Super Bowl — 43 million — than the Grammy Awards or the Academy Awards last year.

“Women are the custodians of most decisions made in the households,” said Mark Waller, the chief marketing officer of the N.F.L. Describing football as “the last great campfire,” which brings families together on Sundays as reliably as church, Waller said women were at the heart of the sport’s most sacred rituals.

At the same time, player safety has become a prominent issue in the league, and more research and awareness has developed on head injuries in the sport. Female fans, particularly those with children, may become decision makers about participation in football. A Centers for Disease Control study released in September showed that N.F.L. players were three times more likely to die of neurodegenerative diseases than the general population.

“This is a powerful issue for everybody,” Waller said, but women “have more of a role to play in managing that issue.”

The N.F.L.’s goal is to convert casual fans, a category that describes the majority of female football watchers, into die-hards. There are overt gestures, like the ubiquitous pink lining the field and accenting uniforms to commemorate breast cancer awareness month in October. But the league has also made more subtle changes in how it reaches its female audience.

Long gone are the days of “pink it and shrink it,” the decades-old approach to women’s N.F.L. apparel. A women’s wear line started in 2010 offers sleek, fitted jerseys in team colors, delighting lifelong fans like Kerry Ann Sullivan.

“I want to wear the colors of the team — I don’t want to wear a softened up version of it,” said Sullivan, 39, who said that she and her brother learned simple math as children by adding a touchdown to a field goal and a 2-point-conversion.

“Now I like it because they’re just making it something that you’d want to wear,” she added.

Celebrity spokeswomen like Serena Williams have appeared in Vogue and Cosmopolitan wearing the new gear, sandwiched between ads for high-end perfume and designer jeans.

N.F.L. television commercials this season have also featured women in prominent roles. One shows a young woman emulating the macho victory pose favored by Green Bay Packers linebacker Clay Matthews as she watches a game on her cellphone.

Other ads, some produced by the N.F.L., address safety concerns. One features a mother being thanked by her son and by the former Giants star Michael Strahan for promoting her son’s safety on the football field. Another has New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady helping to answer a mother’s questions about what the N.F.L. is doing about player safety. But it is not clear that female fans view the risks of the game any differently than men.

“There is nothing like the sound of two helmets crunching,” said Alexis Aarons, 27, who swears allegiance to the Philadelphia Eagles. “It signifies football. There’s no crunching like that in basketball.”

Aarons, whose father is an Eagles season-ticket holder, said she remembered having a front-row view of a collision in 2008 that left a player unconscious on the field for about 20 minutes. But she said such scenes would not deter her from letting her children play.

“If I were a parent, telling my child that they can’t do something that they’re passionate about?” she said, “I just don’t think that that’s fair.”

Deepi Sidhu, such a staunch supporter of the Indianapolis Colts that she once missed a friend’s wedding because a critical Colts game went into overtime, has three children.

“Ignorance is bliss sometimes,” she said, “The more you know about concussions and brain damages, why would you send your child into that?”

On the other hand, Sidhu recognized the attraction of the game.

“I have friends that put their kids in football and the kids loved it,” she said. “I might consider letting let my son play when he’s one of the bigger kids.”

Syreeta Hubbard, 33, said she was frightened when her son would come home from practice complaining of a headache.

“I always try to push him into lacrosse or baseball,” she said.

Still, violence belongs in the sport, said Hubbard, who has loved the Baltimore Ravens — known for their hard-hitting style — since they moved to her hometown in 1996.

“That’s the reality of the game,” she said.

Hubbard compared women’s interest in football to the spectacle of gladiator games in ancient Rome but acknowledged some differences, saying, “We don’t get to see people beheaded, thank God!”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/sports/football/nfl-hones-message-for-its-female-fans.html?partner=rss&emc=rss