Women’s basketball has rapidly become one of the country’s most popular spectator sports. The Indiana Fever, with its star Caitlin Clark, regularly sells out arenas. Several W.N.B.A. games last year attracted more than two million viewers. The 2024 N.C.A.A. women’s championship game drew a larger television audience than the men’s championship.
Yet players in the W.N.B.A. make far less money than many male athletes in less popular sports leagues — and only a sliver of what the average N.B.A. player does. Nothing can justify this extraordinary pay gap.
As a labor economist and an economic historian, I study the world of work, and much of my research has focused on gender pay gaps. Working women in the United States today earn 84 cents for every dollar a man earns, government data shows. My job is to question such data, to make certain that we are comparing apples to apples and then to try to understand why there are differences.
Across the American economy, much of the gender pay gap no longer reflects outright discrimination. It instead reflects the different occupations and industries that men and women choose to enter, as well as other factors. But gender discrimination remains a major problem, and there is now a prominent example for everyone to see: professional basketball.
For the past year, I have worked with the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, the union for W.N.B.A. players, to consider the earnings of basketball players, and I have been surprised by what I found. The average N.B.A. player’s salary is around $10 million in the current season. That is 80 times what the average W.N.B.A. player earned (about $127,000 in salary) in the 2024 season.
A key fact is that the N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. resemble a joint venture in which the league’s individual finances are not transparent to the public. The N.B.A. owns around half of the W.N.B.A. and helps apportion money between the two leagues. Last year the N.B.A. negotiated joint television contracts for the leagues, in which Disney, NBC and Amazon Prime Video agreed to pay the two leagues roughly $77 billion for the right to show their games over 11 years. The gap in player salaries appears to reflect the highly unequal way that N.B.A. owners divide the leagues’ revenue.
Some simple math can help highlight what an economically reasonable gap between N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. salaries might be. The most important factor is viewers’ attention — eyeballs on the screen — which broadcasters monetize by selling advertisements or streaming subscriptions. This revenue allows them to pay the leagues for the right to broadcast games.
The average W.N.B.A. game recently drew about 77 percent of the eyeballs for the average N.B.A. game. The gap in total eyeballs per player is much larger because the N.B.A. has more games per season and longer games. Taking into account all of these differences shows that the W.N.B.A. attracts about 30 percent, or roughly one-third, as many eyeballs per player as the N.B.A. does. This ratio is a reasonable estimate of the actual relationship between W.N.B.A. and N.B.A. broadcast revenue per player — and, by extension, what W.N.B.A. players should receive in salary relative to N.B.A. players.
Broadcast revenue is not the only way that the leagues make money. But it is the primary one. And other sources of revenue point to a broadly similar gap between the leagues. In 2024, for example, the W.N.B.A.’s total attendance was about one-tenth as large as the N.B.A.’s attendance. Adjusting for the fewer teams in the W.N.B.A. shows that it attracts about one-quarter of the attendance per player in the N.B.A. All these numbers suggest that the average W.N.B.A. salary should be roughly one-quarter to one-third of the average N.B.A. salary to achieve pay equity.
Instead, the average W.N.B.A. salary is but a minuscule fraction — a mere 1/80th — of the average N.B.A. salary. How could that be? The most likely explanation is that the W.N.B.A. is not receiving the full value it contributes to the combined N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. enterprise revenue. N.B.A. owners claim that they lose money on the W.N.B.A., yet the recent willingness of investors to pay high sums for W.N.B.A. expansion teams suggests the opposite. In the leagues’ joint venture, management is not giving the W.N.B.A. enough credit for the attention and money its players attract.
Basketball is now experiencing the kind of historical shifts that have the potential to upend the status quo. We saw such a change in tennis starting in 1973 when Billie Jean King gained an equal purse for men and women in the U.S. Open. More recently, the United States Soccer Federation agreed to pay the same rate for game appearances and tournament victories to players on the men’s and women’s teams. In basketball, the women’s game recently surged in popularity, and streaming services have changed the media landscape.
The world of women’s professional basketball is ripe for an economic update that better reflects its influence and irresistibility. But it has not happened yet. The people who run the N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. are instead badly underpaying the women who entertain and thrill us with their feats of athleticism.
Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard University and the author of “Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity,” won the 2023 Nobel in economic science.
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