Pay gap between NBA and WNBA players
Every type of sport played has its fair share of recognition from the 1950s to the 2000s, It has changed the world drastically. Sporting events in fact occupy most of the broadcasting media in the current era. Billions of viewers from around the world tune in to watch their favourite sport and sportspersons. Football has remained a consistent sporting event that has gained millions of viewers to now billions. Some of the other most-viewed sports are the Olympics, Wimbledon, NBA, Cricket world Cup etc.
Apart from the viewership, Sportspersons have a significant influence on their fans by selling their merchandise through which they generate most of the revenue for their respective sports organisation. Revenue is also generated from participation in brand endorsements. Additionally, players receive a lump of money in the form of regular salaries. These salaries range from $10,000 USD to $10M. Every prominent player receives millions for their contribution to their sport. Football, Tennis, Cricket, Basketball players earn one of the highest salaries by signing contracts. Term-based contracts keep them entitled to their club or nation for a period of time which can be renewed or upgraded depending on their progress. Sports are played by both men and women, with a men's team and a women's team respectively and some are individual sports. The one major difference that arises is the pay gap between men and women. Men receive far bigger salaries than compared to women.
Why has there been such a huge gap between men and women in sports? Firstly, men generate more revenue because of a larger fan base and merchandise sales. Secondly, women were allowed to participate in many sports much later than men. The societal norms saw men being more pushed into sports than women. This constituted for governments and organizations to invest resources in men players who played different sports. Even though women have now dominantly shared the same space in the sporting world, the early notion of men bringing in more revenue and fan base has remained all throughout.
The viewership and ratings are also higher when a men's team plays a sport compared to a women’s team because of differences in broadcast media coverage and in-person attendance. When the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship in 2017, it was estimated that over 1 million people came out on the streets to be part of the championship parade in Oakland. On the other hand, When the WNBA Chicago Sky team won the championship in late July, there was very few of people who celebrated the achievement. Consequently, there is a huge pay scale difference between men and women in professional basketball. Stephen Curry in 2020 earned a whopping $43 million playing for the Golden State compared to the WNBA’s prominent sportswoman Sue Bird, who earned $215,000 playing for the Seattle Storm. One of the reasons for this distinction is definitely profiting from viewership. NBA 2K is a video game released every year that has season updates and amazing gameplay, through which profit has been soaring as well. NBA games have over a million viewers and WNBA games have lesser than half of this number. ESPN and other broadcasting networks pay the NBA billions of dollars to broadcast and only pay about 25 million dollars to broadcast WNBA games. Women's sports were hardly given any sports coverage on broadcast media. Almost 95% of the sports coverage are focused on men and men’s teams. Women athletes and teams in sports have lesser popularity. As mentioned above, the main reason for this is that women were only recently provided support to take part in significant national and international events. Viewers were only recently introduced to these events, resulting in lower attention and encouragement towards women. Society had unknowingly established that sports were mainly for men athletes to play, from the early sporting days.
Even though NBA was not very popular in the beginning, the sport grew popular over time. Soon into the 1970s, the sports organizations put immense effort into gaining media and viewer attention in various ways. Inevitably, this helped in high merchandise sales and popular media content. The NBA took decades to build its base as a popular sport, as it is today with 75 seasons. However, the WNBA is only 25 seasons young. This number has resulted in a drastic gap for women athletes to take up equal space in professional basketball, which has led to delayed popularity, low revenue and thus reduced salaries.
In the future, will there be equal pay for men and women in professional basketball?
Women earn far lesser in comparison to men. There are a lot of conversations around the topic of closing the gap on the pay difference between genders for all roles in sports careers. In the sporting world, many have athletes voice their opinions on multiple media platforms to stand with women on equality. Chris Paul, Steph Curry, Kyrie Irving are some of the NBA stars among the many who have risen their voices in favour of equality, not specifically for bridging the pay gap, but also for equal infrastructure, travel and medical amenities, and other resources. However, these opportunities are dependant on the profit generated. It is more of a business-related argument rather than just sexism. The WNBA loses around $10 million in profit while the NBA gains around $8 billion. Yet again, this comes back to viewership and advertisements of such games. There has to be a huge amount of financial and motivational support from governments and sports organisations towards women. These teams need to be given more time to reach the same state as their contemporary male players. This support should extend into encouraging women players to step up and take the role of storytelling through their games, build rivalries, perform trick shots, advertise their rivalry through media broadcasting, create underdog story scenarios that will slowly lure people in to watch more WNBA games, thereby increasing viewership. In the end, it also depends on the viewers to switch to WNBA games more often and empower women in sports. This will likely bridge the pay gap, increase profits for women sports organisations and help in overall gender equality.