In Belgium, Sporza offered RvV in two streams, women online, men on TV. And while some people may have complained because they wanted to watch the men, that position was by no means universal (for one thing, the stream of the women's race kept having trouble because of bandwidth issues caused by greater demand than expected - although I do accept that while many had the choice of either race, others without the ability to watch TV via the internet at the time of the race or in countries where only one race was being broadcast and they didn't cut to the men's race until after the women had finished may have had different positions) and besides, there are always some people who will be annoyed that the coverage they want is being superseded by something they perceive as less important. I mean, there are multiple years we've seen people complaining about Eurosport's priorities on the forum because they wouldn't cut to the freaking Tour of Qatar until a delayed skiing World Championship race was over.
As I've said many times, the problem is chicken-and-egg. There's very little money in women's cycling, therefore there are few real specialists and the sport is less developed. As a result if it is broadcast, people don't know the names, and don't really care about the action. You can see the key moves being made, but if you don't know who's who, you don't know why a given move is important and also, more importantly, you've got little to talk about until the key moves are made, whereas because men's cycling has such a large cast, we can blather about the very artificial BOTD action (I mean seriously, how many stages have we seen where the broadcast starts with three little-heralded domestiques a few minutes up the road, the bunch carefully plans out where to catch them, they're brought back and we have a sprint? Hundreds. Yet we don't say "men's cycling is boring", we say "flat stages at the Tour de France are boring" or "the Tour Down Under is boring" or whatever race has drawn ire that time. You say that the small cast makes it dull (notwithstanding that the smaller teams that results means some interesting racing, but the problem is the number of riders at the top is comparatively small), but a lot of that is that relatively few women can afford to make a living from the sport, and those are the ones that can spend the most time training and working for their cycling so inevitably those are the ones that are the most successful.
The argument goes that they shouldn't get funding because there's no interest, but in most places there hasn't been the opportunity given to them to garner that interest. In most places we're saying "nobody cares about women's cycling", but how do we know? Because it's not being broadcast? But if you don't have the chance to watch it, how can you discover an interest in it? I didn't wake up one day and think "I'm going to devour every bit of information about cycling I can". I became interested because I saw a race that passed where I was living at the time, watched the end of it on the TV to try and make sense of what I saw, and thought "this looks interesting, I'll have to check more of this out". And then, because men's cycling is on TV plenty, I did so, learned the characters of the péloton, tactics, and so on. If you watch a women's race and you find it entertaining, you'd have to be stupendously dedicated to learn that way, because of how infrequent the coverage is, and the chances to watch races live and get invested in them as they happen is even rarer. Do I blame people who say "yea, I'll watch the women at the Worlds or the Olympics, but I'm not interested enough to make the effort to follow it year-round"? Hell no. I don't even have a problem with those who say "because of that, I don't even really care about their race at the Worlds or Olympics, since I'm not invested enough". Most cycling fans aren't the super-fans who'll hunt around for streams or highlights of the GP des Marbriers or the Vuelta a Asturias either. But to go the Pete Kennaugh "nobody should care about you because nobody cares about you" route is just not productive (and leads to posts like this in the thread that was specifically designed to prevent discussions like this breaking out periodically across the board). Look at the crowds generated by the Women's Tour in the UK - sure, lots of casual fans who couldn't name you more than about five riders - mostly Britons, mostly because of the track team - but there are also lots of those at the men's races too.
To address the other suggestions made, the idea of the women riding ahead of the men works on some levels but not on others. At races like Gent-Wevelgem, Strade Bianche, de Ronde and Flèche it's fine, as the women's race is shorter, so starting both at the same time does not cause any problem in overlap. Multi-class racing à la Le Mans is also mooted above, but (imo sensibly) rejected due to the issue of different paces of pélotons - in cyclocross at the lower level this is exactly what does happen and it isn't problematic as everybody is generally either on their own or in a small group, but in road racing because of the high quantity of pack racing it wouldn't really be feasible (plus UCI restrictions on race lengths vary too of course). Also you'd have to make a very clear protocol - in circuit racing at present in both men's and women's cycling, lapped traffic is pulled off the course to allow the leaders through; in XC skiing the onus is on the athlete being lapped to get out of the way of those lapping them, in sportscar racing the onus is on the faster car to make their way safely through. Of course at a lot of races the point-to-point multi-start option is not a possibility - take circuit-based races. That said, I think races like the Canadian one-dayers could be good spots for a men's and women's race on the same day or alternating, much like with Plouay or the Philadelphia International - there's local interest, the course would be perfectly good for racing (and Worlds prep of course) and because the crowd would already be out there, they can maximise the audience.
I don't favour the imposition of women's teams on World Tour teams because the interest varies (just look at how the Cervélo Test Team, given a lot of promotion by Cervélo, were relegated to afterthoughts after the Garmin merger and cast aside after a year); I would ideally like women's cycling to have the chance to succeed under its own steam and develop organically rather than by being imposed on teams from above and turning into a facsimile of the men's racing. If it has a fair chance to sink or swim and it sinks, then so be it. But at the moment it is only rarely being given the chance to swim - and not often enough to make more than a few strokes either.
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