The concluding sentence of Mary Pilon’s homage to economic ignorance points at us.
Now it’s on fans to pay attention.
To be fair, more you (if you follow basketball) than me, since I’m not really a fan. But either way, Pilon’s dot connections are clear: the reason Brittney Griner in in prison in Russia is because you suck at being fans.
The economics stateside for female hoopers are abysmal. Top male college basketball stars may pursue multimillion-dollar careers in the N.B.A. Women who possess comparable talent fare differently. The maximum W.N.B.A. base salary for the 2022 season was about $228,000. The salary of Stephen Curry, the highest paid N.B.A. player last season, was almost $46 million, which means the highest paid man earned roughly 200 times what his woman counterpart did for a similar job.
That isn’t a glass ceiling — it’s a glass stratosphere. In one of the most public workplaces in the world.
Granted, in this age of “equality or bust,” there can be no reason other than sexism why a man is paid more than a woman to do the same job. Often, the comparison is false, the jobs aren’t the same, there are significant differences that easily explain pay differentials, but here, that’s clearly not the case.
The game is basketball and the job is putting a round orange ball through a ten foot high hoop, while preventing the other team from doing the same. Man or woman, or whatever descriptive word one chooses, it’s the same gig. So what else could it be other than sexism that they aren’t paid the same?
One of the common refrains to explain away the American basketball pay gap is that the W.N.B.A. is a newer league than the N.B.A., founded in 1996, compared to the N.B.A.’s origination in the 1940s.
It’s unclear what’s meant here by “common,” as I’ve never heard this before, though I might not be a good example of common when it comes to gender pay disputes.
Yet by crunching the numbers for pay between the N.B.A. and the W.N.B.A. at the same period in their life cycles, the professors Nola Agha of the University of San Francisco and David Berri of Southern Utah University found that W.N.B.A. players were paid less even after accounting for the age of the league.
So it’s got nothing to do with the maturity of the leagues, even if America was fairly familiar with the concept of basketball before the WNBA was formed. So what, then, could it possibly be?
“It can sometimes explain systems in place that cause completely different outcomes,” Professor Agha said in an interview. She added: “You have a century of people not used to spectating women’s sports because in so many ways it was belittled and shut down and questioned. And then we go to the current time frame and you see underinvestment.”
There’s a little bias trick in there. Something that went unstated, and was merely glossed over, but can’t be if one wants to be remotely honest about this. The assumption is that people want to watch sports, in general, and basketball, in particular, whether played by women or men with equal interest. The reason, Professor Agha assumes, that this isn’t in fact happening is that we “belittled” women’s sport causing people to be “unused” to watching it. And then comes the proof.
The real cash infusion in sports has come from television. The W.N.B.A.’s television deal with ESPN pays about $25 million per year, compared with the N.B.A.’s total combined $24 billion for its deals with ESPN and Turner Sports, which wrap after the 2024-25 season.
Consider also the literal space in which people watch women’s sports. There is only one — one! — sports bar in the country, perhaps in the world, devoted exclusively to women’s sports, the Sports Bra in Portland, Ore.
Can you imagine all those dopey bar owners across the country losing big bucks hand over fist by not dedicating their “bras” (oh, come on, that’s pretty uplifting) to women’s sports? Pilon apparently believes this is how economics works, that the problem is that the failure of supply has caused there to be no demand.
Limited television exposure in the United States not only makes it hard for fans to follow the games, or find them in the first place, but also fuels the pay gap. Smaller TV contracts mean smaller paychecks for players. Creating a culture of fandom around women’s sports can’t happen overnight and needs effort from fans, leagues, sponsors and media stakeholders.
This op-ed was superficially about Griner, but it really wasn’t. Rather, it was about the pay gap in women’s sport, and sought to lay out the economics of professional sports backwards as if to shame you, the putative basketball fans who love watching the big guys on the court but have been denied the opportunity to similarly adore their femininish counterparts such that women’s sports has been prevented from establishing a fan base that will give rise to huge cable contracts, tons of women-only sports bars and no future need to go to Russia to earn a buck in the off-season and get busted for forgetting to clean out the hash oil from your vaping thingy.
Ultimately, it’s you fans. You. You are responsible for Brittney Griner’s imprisonment because you have allowed big-boy-sports to deny you sufficient opportunity to love big-girl-sports just as much. Why can’t you be more like the Russian oligarchs who appreciate tall women?
And if you don’t clean up your television viewing habits at sports bars, you never know what bad things will come of it.
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I regret that I clicked on that last link.
#MeToo
I am always cautious of any link that might lead to a random image of Roxane Gay.
Sounds like Russian propaganda. Did the administration approve this?
Why don’t the women play in the NBA if the money is so much better and the game is no different?
I don’t follow sports, but isn’t the caliber of play, and the degree of athletic ability req’d to achieve that level of play, much higher in the NBA?
Everybody wants to know why women don’t make $40M dollars for playing basketball, nobody ever asks the same question about short, middle-aged white guys with the athletic ability of a bean bag chair.
I resemble that remark.
Maybe they need better marketing and social media, some place where OnlyFans can hang out.
This is political metaphor, right? Can’t wait for a “Swish swish bish” to get dropped in the 2024
vicepresidential debates.If women supported the WNBA the same way men support the NBA, the WNBA salaries would be greater since there are more women than men.
Why is the WNBA’s TV revenue given per year whereas the NBA’s is for 9-year contract?
And how many sports bars are devoted exclusively to men’s sports?
This is a problem not only in sports but in media and entertainment more broadly. People like what they like and explaining why vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate will not convince someone who prefers chocolate to change their mind. If women’s basketball is an inherently enjoyable product, people will watch it and become fans. Given that ESPN and its ilk are showing more women’s basketball highlights now than I think they ever have (almost certainly as a result of the Britney Griner situation), the sport is getting perhaps its broadest exposure ever, so if it is to succeed on its own, it has its moment in the spotlight.
But if the only reason that I should like your product is because it bears a similarity to that of which I am already a fan but with more women (or members of whichever aggrieved group is currently in vogue) or because it imparts the important political message du jour, I am unlikely to become a fan of your product. And trying to shame or hector me for my preferences is more likely to destroy whatever goodwill I might have had and poison me to dislike any future endeavors you try to peddle to me than to win me over to your cause.
“The game is basketball and the job is putting a round orange ball through a ten foot high hoop, while preventing the other team from doing the same. Man or woman, or whatever descriptive word one chooses, it’s the same gig.”
I know this isn’t your argument, but such a stance is disingenuous. “Equal pay for equal work” is predicated on “equal work,” but the WNBA is “equal” to the NBA in the same way that a programmer for a small IT consulting firm is “equal” to a one at Google. If the WNBA were “equal work,” there would be no shortage of women in the NBA itself, where they could easily command much higher salaries. Shockingly, not a single woman has even broken into the D-league.
It’s foolish to shame fans for being sexist when they know this very real fact about the difference in abilities. Does that justify a 200x difference in compensation? I don’t know, but given that even the best female player has zero chance of making it into any professional men’s league, their salary would seem to be infinitely higher than what they can command on equal footing.
Lacrosse is the oldest sport in the Americas, therefore lacrosse players should be paid the most. The only reason I can think for this not being the case is discrimination against Native Americans who created the game. Blaze Riorden, the current MVP, clearly deserves to be paid more than Steph Curry.
Maybe try being patient, women’s cycling has advanced massively in the last two years and the rebooted women’s Tour de France was more exciting than the men’s race this year.
As mentioned elsewhere women’s sports would do better if women supported women’s sports more actively.
As for the economics, lots of second tier men play basketball in Europe or Russia to make money beyond their low level NBA contracts or because they didn’t get an NBA contract. It’s nothing new and Ms. Griner is only news because she has enough intersectional victim points. A white male NBA journeyman popped for drug possession in Russia would be a blip on the sports page not a cause celebre.
My daughter played against Brittany Griner in high school. So I’ve both seen Griner play up close lots of times and was a huge supporter of girls in sports. We had four daughters and I supported everything they did athletically (and otherwise) and in fact frequently ended up being the (or one of the) coaches because I wanted them to have the opportunity.
All that said, I suspect that 6’3” average athletically me in my 1975 tight shorts BB uniform could have hung with Brittany in competition. And nobody would pay a billion $ to watch guys like me play. It’s the same as the mens and womens soccer team – generate the income, share in the reward.
People who write claptrap like this ignore basic economics to pound their victimhood.
This comment is superficially about Griner, but it really isn’t.
Brittney’s best in her league, high falutin’.
But hoops is just one kind of shootin’.
Would that someone today
Should put Foxley¹ in play
And sink one in the psychopath Putin!
FN 1: An abandoned 1944 SOE operation.
In keeping with the last few sentences of this piece I thought of the old National Lampoon magazine subscription ad where it showed a picture of a puppy with a gun to its head threatening what could happen if one didn’t subscribe.
It’s hard for me to feel anything for WNBA players; they’re making 6 figure salaries doing what they love.
“Women who possess comparable talent…”
Anything is comparable to anything else I guess, but if compared head to head, a more accurate description would be, “women who possess lesser talent.”
They could beat me though. Not sure if anyone would pay to watch that…