The objective should be to ensure that both races are placed in the maximal position to succeed. It does not surprise me to see that in the Netherlands the footage for the women - broadcast at a later time when more people who may have gone out for the day have returned home and sat down in front of the TV - is more successful than it is in Belgium; women's cycling has more currency in the Netherlands and of course more established star names who have recognition among less hardcore fans who mightn't be so familiar with the women's péloton are from the Netherlands. Belgium's women's cycling supporter base will largely be dependent on Lotte Kopecky at this moment in time.
The flip side is that because of that, there is also a negative expectation in terms of the roadside audience if you put the women's race after the men's. When the women went through beforehand, they were perceived somewhat as a support act, a warm-up, so they would get a large crowd, but a crowd that was, for the most part, there with the primary intention of watching the men race through later. This does help with the perception on the TV with large crowds, but it does have the flip side that it does have the TV scheduling issue as, of course, the point is to catch all of the relevant action in both races, which especially now there are minimum broadcast requirements on the WWT means that having the women's race first can impact that.
Personally I think it varies race to race. If somebody says they don't want to switch to the women's race to catch the finale 100km from the end of the men's Ronde van Vlaanderen because they might miss some key action, I can understand that. If they say the same thing about La Flèche Wallonne, I can't - because we don't have reasonable expectations of decisive action - that can't be caught up on in an instant - taking place 100km from the end in that race, whereas at the Ronde, we can and often do see action that has some relevance to the important selections taking place that early. The problem is that with so much more coverage available now, in many markets you will see a bit of broadcast fatigue bleed away viewers who might actually have been interested in the women's race but have simply been watching five or six hours of cycling by that point. At a race like Flèche you can broadcast the mens' and women's race as part of the same, existing broadcast package in terms of the timeslot, because the men aren't likely to see any decisive moves taken until the later stages of the race and the women are more likely to light the touchpaper sooner (although it's becoming less the case now as professionalism increases and the Mur de Huy becomes more uniformly decisive) - but at something like RVV you'd need to broadcast lengthy coverage of both races independent of one another, and given the commitment to broadcast time required for the WWT status, it makes logical sense for them to therefore append it to the existing coverage. After all that's what worked for the Giro Donne back in the day, holding their race early on, and having a highlights package ready to be appended to the end of the Tour de France coverage.
Also you have the issue of races where they have circuits or spaghetti-plate route designs that mean that care has to be taken to keep the two respective pélotons from crossing paths with one another.
As long as the races offer fair opportunity to both to make the race, things can be reasonable I think - the issue is more where you get things like the Tokyo Olympic RR or the RideLondon Classique where the women are fobbed off with a demonstrably inferior course, which seems to be improving a bit lately but there are enough cases fresh in the mind where it still remains something that we feel needs addressing. They don't necessarily need to have the same obstacles (although where historic races like de Ronde or Roubaix are involved, they do need to have enough of the iconic locations of those races to feel that they merit the identity) - just comparable opportunities to make the race. There have been some comments about the size of the gaps created by multi-mountain stages in women's cycling, but then we cannot improve the depth of the women's péloton over those courses without giving them the opportunities to race them, and also make the pure grimpeuse - a Gaia Realini, Nikola Nosková, Eider Merino type - a more valued type of rider to the big teams to have so that they can get those development opportunities.
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