WHY THE WAGE GAP?
By Andrea Lauritsen | April 22, 2024
On April 7th, 24 million people flipped through the channels and tapped their phones to tune in to the women’s March Madness championship game between South Carolina and Iowa—that’s 10 million more views than the men’s championship game!
Needless to say, conversations surrounding March Madness sounded a lot of different this year.
Caitlin Clark, one of the many talented athletes in particular, attracted the media’s attention like never before. Dawn Staley, a Hall of Famer and head coach for South Carolina, did just the same which made the South Carolina win against Iowa a must watch.
The WNBA Draft which shortly followed the tournament maintained record breaking momentum with a 300% increase in views compared to the previous draft
Clark, the 2024 No. 1 draft pick will earn a base salary of approximately 75,000 dollars as a rookie based on reports.
In comparison, the No. 1 draft pick for the NBA will earn approximately 10 million dollars.
On top of brand deals and partnerships, Clark is predicted to make less money than the base salary of the NBA’s No. 1 draft pick which of course led to ample discourse on X and other social media platforms.
An issue like this can only be solved if the root, or roots in this case, are addressed first.
Since the NBA and WNBA have a long history of problematic differences, the roots of this tree of problems are often intertwined.
In effort to simplify this, I’ll address each concern one at a time.
Essentially, when it comes to the difference in the athletes’ salaries, the two main contributors at a play include: the amount of revenue that the NBA and WNBA bring in and the amount of games they play.
There are only 40 games in the WNBA compared to the NBA in which athletes play 82 games.
Issues like revenue-sharing and collective bargaining agreements also contribute to the longstanding tree of problems.
While it’s unfortunate that there are numerous factors to consider, these issues themselves can’t be fixed unless organizations like WNBA change their structure.
Since the NBA has over two times more games than the WNBA, the NBA brings in approximately 10 billion dollars annually — that’s a pretty large pie!
The WNBA, however, has a pie that is only 200 million dollars big. While that seems like a lot regardless, it makes for a comparable difference.
Additionally, the size of the slice, as seen in the pie charts above, indicates an added layer of issues.
To put it simply, not only are athletes given different slice sizes of their respective pies, but the overall size of their pies are different too.
In 2025, women in the WNBA will get to negotiate revenue shared. This means, they can discuss issues like incremental revenue. However, leagues have targets. Bloomberg reports that the WNBA has yet to his theirs. As a result, athletes in WNBA do not get to collect revenue based on the goals that the WNBA has in place.
To no surprise, the NBA does not work like this. The players in the NBA get 50% of revenue from broadcasting deals to ticket sales!
“We are not asking to get paid what the men get paid. We’re asking to get paid the same percentage of revenue shared,” Las Vegas Aces player Kelsey Plum said on The Residency Podcast in 2022
(Click on the TV to watch Plum’s interview on revenue sharing!)
Until then, it’s vital that women’s basketball continues to get the media coverage it deserves.
Luckily, reports show an increased interest in purchasing tickets so tickets for the Indiana Fever games, for instance, have increased in cost. While this may not be great for our wallets, it’s positively impacts the women athletes who have not been financially compensated just quite yet.
Without consistent media attention, all of these issues will be hard to tackle.
For the structure of the WNBA to change, we need to keep these conversations alive.
By asking the right questions and amplifying the right voices like athletes in the WNBA, we are headed in a great direction.