The NBA and WNBA pay gap has been an issue for years. Basketball, the third most popular sport in the world has an issue with its top level leagues. The pay gap between the highest level professional leagues for women and men is too much. This Inquiry will discuss why these issues are prevalent, some different solutions to the issue, and the best solution to this issue. This thesis statement is for the WNBA to work on their marketing strategies, and pursue more sponsorship. After this, they should add 4 expansion teams and increase the season length. Doing this will help the pay between these two sports leagues become more even, and make the WNBA become more popular; an issue that is also universal in this league. We need to do something now before the issue becomes out of hand and the gap becomes too much.
Dallas Mavericks Players’ Income: Dallas Wings Players’ Income:
The pay in the WNBA is very low for the high level that they perform at. These graphs above show the income comparison between two teams. The Dallas Mavericks are the NBA team and the Wings are the WNBA team. One of the graphs is in thousands and the other is in millions. This shows the vast difference with the pay. For the WNBA graph, the median is $70 thousand USD per year. The lowest income is $47 thousand and the highest is $175 thousand. This means the range is $128 thousand. On the NBA side however, even the lowest income is more than 5 times the highest WNBA income. For the NBA, the median is $4 million USD per year. The highest income is $29 million and the lowest is $1 million. This means the range is $28 million. The NBA and WNBA incomes are reasonably similarly spread out compared to the other salaries in the team. The comparison in average salary for these two teams is shocking. For the NBA Dallas Mavericks, the average salary is 7800000 USD. The WNBA Dallas Wings average salary is 86000 USD.
Women's sport has been lacking pay compared to men’s sport for decades. This graph above shows the highest paid female athletes in the world.There are no WNBA players on this graph. Infact, there are no WNBA players even close to being on this graph. An average WNBA player earns just above $100000 USD per year. This salary is about the same as a trainee surgeon or an experienced doctor. The WNBA players have a low salary compared to other professional sports women as well.
The NBA is hugely popular all around the world. The format of the NBA is very complicated. It involves many rules about salaries, rosters, trades and games. The WNBA is different from this format because of the low numbers of viewers and supporters of the league. The NBA has 30 teams with a Western and Eastern conference of 15 each. The WNBA however only has 12 teams involved with 2 conferences of 6 teams each. The format of the season is also very different. A WNBA team plays 36 games in a year with an opportunity to play up to 4 more in the playoffs. In an NBA season, a team can play up to 110 games in 1 season including the playoffs. Because of these differences, the level of pay becomes uneven. This graph below shows the top NBA players' pay compared to the top WNBA players' pay. Every second player is a WNBA player in this graph. It really puts into perspective the vast differences between the two leagues.
There must be a reason that the WNBA is paid far less than the NBA. One of these reasons is that the NBA has been around for far longer than the WNBA. The NBA has been a professional sports league for 74 years. On the other hand, the WNBA has only been around for 25 years. The general consensus is that because of this, the NBA is better and a more reliable sports league. Another reason that the NBA is paid more is because of the stigma surrounding women’s sport. Clair Chandler says in this article that “the lesbian stereotypes of mannishness, aggression, and butchness have their root in sexism and patriarchy. The perceived violations of gender norm expectations by lesbian women are turned into homophobia and thus labeling becomes a weapon of the homophobic and the sexist. Since this time, women’s sports have increased in number and participation, but have an inferior status in terms of both funding and following.“This exclusion of women in sports, and stereotyping of any women who chooses to pursue sports professionally is the source of the inequity between the NBA and WNBA.
The idea around professional sports is that men are far better than women. If Lebron James was to play against players from the WNBA, he would dominate. I however believe that if the WNBA players have Lebron’s athletic ability, height and size, they could be closer to his level. There are statistics to back this up. The WNBA three point percentage in the 2020 season was 33.59%. This statistic is very close to the 35.7% that the NBA shoots from the three point line. The difference in size and height between the NBA and WNBA explains this small difference. I think that WNBA players deserve to be recognized as players that work very hard, similar to the work ethic of NBA players. There should not be an idea that the WNBA players are bad at basketball. The one thing holding the players back is their size disadvantage. Because of the hormones that men produce, the average height of the NBA will always be much taller than in the WNBA. This is why people think the WNBA is a weaker league and do not tend to follow it as much.
The league is where WNBA players are paid from. This graph shows the difference between the percentage of revenue that the league pays the players with.
The WNBA pays their players with 20% of what they earn in a season. This figure is around $60 million USD. This is compared to the $8.7 Billion USD that the NBA generates every season. 50% of that figure goes towards the players’ salary. Something has to be done about the unfair pay gap.
The NBA is far more well known than the WNBA. A key factor in this is sponsorship involved in each of these leagues. Sponsorship is a massive part of the NBA today. As Shaquille O’Neal said “I hate how the NBA has become so much about sponsorship these days. All I want to do is play basketball, eat Doritos and wear my Reebok Running Shoes.” All humour aside, the money that sponsors pump into the NBA is ridiculous. In 2020, the NBA got $1.4 Billion USD from sponsorship alone. This is almost 20% of the entire leagues’ revenue. Sponsors play a key part in the income earned by the players, and it is a possible solution to the pay gap. This solution is for the WNBA to work on their marketing strategies and for the NBA to put work into sponsors giving money to the WNBA as well. This solution has its pros and cons.
Having more sponsors in the WNBA could change its course. Currently, less than 5% of the WNBA revenue comes from sponsorship deals. If the NBA does spend money on the WNBA sponsorship, this figure could skyrocket and instead of earning $3million USD a year, they could earn closer to $50 Million USD. Currently, around $12 Million USD goes into players salaries from the WNBA revenue. If the league’s revenue expands by $50 Million then the total revenue would be about $110 million USD per season. With the 20% of the league’s revenue that goes to player salaries, the players could divide an extra $8 million per year amongst themselves and the league could have more money to keep expanding. However, there are negatives to this sponsorship as well. It might not be as easy as that to get sponsors into the WNBA. The WNBA is far less popular as stated before, and sponsors might feel that their money is best suited going elsewhere.
The NBA revenue and WNBA revenue are completely different. As I have said before, the WNBA is paid with 20% of the revenue and the NBA is paid with 50%. Changing these figures so that they are not so uneven could be a great solution. I have learnt over the process of the inquiry that it is as much an issue of overpaying NBA players as it is underpaying WNBA players. We can change the amount of revenue that goes to paying players to 35% for each league. For the NBA right now, this could be paying the players with the equal ratio to what they had before, just with $3.15 billion USD instead of $4.3. For the WNBA, they could divide $21 million USD instead of $12 million USD per season. This would narrow down the pay gap. The NBA players salary would decrease by 30% and the WNBA salaries would increase by 75%.
This solution might look like an easy way to decrease the pay gap, however, it does have its downsides. The WNBA is owned by the NBA. Every year, the NBA helpes the WNBA out with money and puts effort into keeping it alive. If the WNBA decided to spend much more of their revenue on the players, they could lose money in other crucial parts of the league. The NBA has $4 Billion USD every season to keep the league expanding, to pay their staff and to run a successful professional sports championship. The WNBA also need to do this, but they have only $45 million, a figure much smaller than the NBA. Paying the players with 35% of their revenue could spell doom for the league and do far more harm than good.
Currently, the WNBA season is 36 games per team. With 12 teams in the league, this is a large amount of games. In the NBA, a season is 82 games per team. This is because the NBA has more money to transport players, and the season is longer. They also have more roster spots in the NBA so more players can be on the rotation. The WNBA would benefit from having more games in the season because there would be more ticket sales and more TV deals. Extending the season would be a very quick way to make more money for the players and for the league.
Extending the season could have many rippl je effects. With 12 players in a WNBA roster, they can easily have enough players on the bench if the starters were injured for part of the season, however, if the amount of games in a season increases, players would need to rest, and the demand would become too much for the starters and the bench players. Another negative effect of extending the season would be that players can be injured more easily and the league could lose popularity with star players missing from lineups. With extending the season, although it may give the league more money with tickets and TV deals, they will lose more money with the transportation of players.
The NBA has had huge success with expansion teams in the past. Expansion teams are when basketball is brought to new cities in the USA and Canada. With the WNBA currently, there are only 12 teams. Fans in Canada and other large cities have been calling for the WNBA to add teams to their cities. I think adding 4 expansion teams over the next 4 seasons would give the WNBA far more popularity and will bring the pay up. This is because more fans will want to watch games. More sponsors will pursue teams in their state, and there will be more games for more tickets. These expansion teams would be in San Francisco Bay Area, Philadelphia, Houston, and Toronto. This is a reality that the league is looking into now.
The logistics of the expansion would be something the league could pull off. All of these locations all have professional mens’ teams, and state of the art arenas. This means no new Centres would have to be built. As well as this, Fans in these areas have large incomes and there would be an interest in the teams. Some of the negatives of having expansion teams include paying players from 4 extra teams would cost the WNBA more money, and that expansion teams usually take up to 10 years to be championship contenders. Another bad omen is that in the past, 4 WNBA teams have folded due to financial hardship. Hopefully, these negatives could be outweighed by the positives of having more teams and hopefully, more money.
The last possible solution is for the WNBA players to protest until there is pay equity between the WNBA and NBA. There is a human right that every person has a right to protest unfair working conditions. Although getting paid 10s of thousands to play sport, travel and stay in hotels may not be argued as unfair in terms of human rights, I think it is unfair compared to the NBA standards. By protesting, the WNBA players could enhance their pay and have more benefits playing in the WNBA. Protesting could be not playing games, not complying with league rules, or simply spreading a message. This could be a way for the players to force equality.
WNBA players have protested before. However, they have never gone against their own league because of pay. The Atlanta Dream in 2020 spread messages involving their owner who had spoken against feminism and the Black Lives Matter movement. This protest was successful, but I do not believe that the WNBA players could protest against their own league to the same triumph. This is because the league would not be any better off with players turning against them, and adopting a different solution would prove much more sustainable and preferable.
We have 5 solutions to choose the best solution from. The first solution is for the WNBA to work on their marketing strategies. Also for the NBA to encourage sponsors giving money to the WNBA. The second solution is for the NBA and the WNBA to have the same percentage of revenue given to player salaries. The third solution is for the WNBA to increase the number of games in a season to 55. The penultimate solution is for the WNBA to expand to 16 teams instead of 12. The final solution is for players to protest until they have pay equity with the NBA. All of these solutions have pros and cons, yet a preferable solution can be drawn out by combining various ideas. This table shows the solutions marked on 7 different fields. The lowest numbered solutions are the best.
As the table shows, three solutions are preferable. By adding more sponsorship and having better marketing of the WNBA, the revenue can increase. This will give the WNBA enough money to pay more players from the 4 expansion teams. Once these expansion teams come to life, the league will earn money from the ticket sales and television deals involved with having new teams in the league. Over the next few seasons, the WNBA can add more games and make a single season longer. This new league format can include 3 games against each team in the WNBA as well as an extra fourth game against each team in the conference. This pathway is reliable, has a good impact on both the NBA and WNBA, and will not cost too much money to set up. The combination of these is the best solution to the pressing problem.
The pay gap between the WNBA and the NBA has become too much. Something needs to be done. By improving marketing strategies, expanding the league to 16 teams, and increasing the season to 52 games per team. The WNBA can become a successful league that does not need to be overshadowed by the NBA and other womens sports championships. This is what needs to be done to have pay equity in professional basketball in the United States.
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