There has always been a pay discrepancy between men’s and women’s sports. Despite this issue being brought to public attention, the pay gap has not closed and has been getting wider in recent years.
What Is a Pay Discrepancy?
Pay discrepancies can happen across all areas of employment, but in recent years they have become more prominent in professional sports. A pay discrepancy occurs “when workers doing equivalent jobs do not earn the same compensation for their work.”
Pay discrepancies are in all professional sports across all levels and have been happening since women’s professional sports leagues started. While the media highlighted the pay gap over time, there is still a long way to go before the pay is equal.
How Is It Important to Sports?
The fight for equal pay has been long and continuous. According to Payscale, the pay discrepancy in arts, entertainment, and sports is 94%. While pay does differ by level, at the professional level, men are paid 15% to 100% more than their female counterparts playing the same sport.
The average male NBA player earns $5.3 million a year. The average WNBA player earns $130,000 a year. A 2021 BBC study found that male golf professionals make on average $1.1 million, and female professionals earn $212,000. Even when accounting for the differences in revenue between the two, this pay discrepancy is astronomical.
Soccer and tennis are two sports that have often been at the forefront of this movement. The National Women’s Soccer Team launched a lawsuit based on equal pay. Tennis is one of the first sports in the spotlight about this issue, with Billie Jean King making groundbreaking progress and gaining national attention.
Women sports had to fight hard to be acknowledged, but they are still not on the same level as their male counterparts. The win of the NWST lawsuit was a sign of progress, but there is still much progress to be made.
How Its Progressed
Billy Jean King is often considered the founder of this movement. On September 20, 1973, King played a match against former men’s tennis champion Bobby Riggs in a “battle of the sexes.” Riggs was a well-known chauvinist with a history of belittling women’s tennis. In this competition, King beat Riggs three matches in a row. While this was not an immediate fix to the misogyny in sports, it was enough to get a foot in the door. King later formed a players union and continued to fight for equal pay.
This fight continued to be an uphill battle, with the most recent win among women’s soccer players. After six years, in February 2022, the US Women Soccer Players Association won a settlement on discrimination and unequal pay. The US men’s and women’s soccer teams will now operate with separate bargaining agreements. Still, the players will all get the same amount for public appearances, prize money, federation revenue, and game bonuses.
This is a huge step forward for equal pay, but it is only one sport. Sports like basketball and baseball still have a pay gap more significant than any other sport. With fan support and the work of players’ associations, the pay gap has an opportunity to decrease and one day goes away completely.
I am a fan of many sports. The issue with female equal pay is simply that, in most sports, their level of play is not equivalent of the men. Most sports fans want to see whatever sport they are watching to be the highest level possible. So the level of play is really what determines the pay and also the gate and or tv rights income. To me it would be fairer to have the women receive as big a piece of the income pie as their male counterparts. Lets say an NBA event grosses 100 million on live and tv gate and the WBA event grosses 50 million. The fairest method here would be the women receive half of what the males bring in. That seems the fairest method to me. So it is not discrimination unless the women are not receiving the same pct of gross income that their event generates.