The release of WNBA star Brittney Griner from a Russian prison last week after 10 months in custody ignited a firestorm of opinions about the prisoner swap. It also brought to light the inequities faced by professional female basketball players in the United States.
The fact that Griner chose to play in Russia in the first place is a reminder of the enormous pay gap that exists between WNBA and NBA players. It is the reason roughly half of the players on WNBA rosters leave the country every off-season to supplement their incomes in Russia, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Israel and France.
The maximum WNBA salary this season was $228,094, the average was $130,000 and the minimum was $60,000. While those are good salaries by normal person standards, they pale in comparison to what NBA players pull in.
The NBA minimum salary this season is $1.017 million. Steph Curry’s salary is $48.1 million this season, Russell Westbrook’s is $47.1 million, and LeBron James’ is $44.5 million.
To summarize: $60,000 minimum salary for a woman vs. $1.017 million for a man.
Much of the revenue in professional sports comes from TV rights deals, and the gap between WNBA and NBA TV contracts is huge. The WNBA deal with ESPN is for about $25 million. The NBA combined deal with ESPN and Turner is worth about $24 billion.
To summarize: $25 million in TV revenue for women vs $24 billion for men.
Like every other business, it comes down to supply and demand. Although the WNBA is more popular now than it was 20 years ago, it still caters to a niche audience and struggles for mainstream exposure. It would be unrealistic to think that a WNBA player and NBA player should get equal pay based on basic economic principles.
However, does the divide have to be that big? No. It does not. Team owners and the media need to do a better job promoting and marketing women’s sports. Fans are obsessed with NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL and soccer stars largely because they know the players’ back stories and personalities. They are familiar with men’s sports’ rivalries, injuries, stats, and contract disputes.
Griner is an eight-time WNBA All-Star, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, three-time Russian league champion and NCAA champion. In 2009, she was the nation’s No. 1-rated high school player. She was the No. 1 pick in the 2013 WNBA Draft.
And yet, she has gotten far more publicity for her incarceration than her stellar basketball career.
It is not just a basketball problem.
The world’s highest-paid soccer player, Argentine star Lionel Messi, made $130 million in 2021 — $75 million salary and $55 million in endorsements.
The highest-paid female soccer player in the world, Alex Morgan, is worth $5.8 million, but only $250,000 of that is combined salary from the San Diego Wave and U.S. national team. The rest comes from her endorsements, which include Nike, Coca-Cola and Secret.
The highest salary in the National Women’s Soccer League is $281,000, which is what Trinity Rodman (daughter of NBA legend Dennis Rodman) makes with the Washington Spirit. The highest salary in Major League Soccer is $7.2 million. The NWSL minimum salary is $35,000 vs $84,000 in MLS.
In negotiating for a new collective bargaining agreement earlier this year, the NWSL Players Association used a “No More Side Hustles” campaign to highlight the plight of players who couldn’t survive on their salaries alone. They got the minimum salary increased by 60 percent from $22,000 in 2021 to $35,000 in 2022. The maximum went up by more than 40 percent from $46,200 to $75,000.
Hey, that’s still not much. But it’s a baby step in the right direction.
The only women’s professional sport that offers equal prize money is tennis, and that has come after decades of battles that began with Billie Jean King. It also seems to be easier to market female athletes in skirts and leotards — tennis, figure skating, gymnastics — than women who play contact sports in baggy shorts.
Dan Levy, vice president of Olympics and women’s sports for the Wasserman sports management agency, has represented many of the nation’s top female athletes, including Morgan, Mia Hamm, Megan Rapinoe and swimmer Katie Ledecky. He has seen great strides in women’s sports during the past 20 years. Still, he says, when it comes to equal and fair compensation, women have a long way to go.
“Women have to be ‘more than’; they can’t just make the kind of money men make playing their sport,” Levy told me for a 2019 story I wrote about the gender pay gap in sports. “They have to be marketable. They have to have a cause, a look, a flamboyant personality, something unique. So, there are ways for them to be really valuable from a marketability standpoint, but they can’t just make money playing a sport.”
Case in point: Haley and Hanna Cavinder, the University of Miami basketball playing twins, are terrific players. Haley scored a game-high 25 points on Sunday against the University of Florida. But the main reason they have made an estimated $1 million in Name, Image, Likeness sponsorships is that they have four million TikTok followers who like their choreographed dance routines.
“The tennis example is unique because at their majors, they compete in the same event as the men,” Levy said. “You buy a ticket to get into Wimbledon or the U.S. Open, and that gets you an opportunity to watch men or women play. So, they’ve had an opportunity to grow beside their male counterparts in a way that women of no other sport have. Salaries are getting marginally better, but for women who play sports, particularly team sports, it’s still a minor league, so to speak.”
As the mother of a daughter who played 14 years of soccer, that reality is depressing. Female athletes work and compete just as hard. Their stories are just as interesting. But their stories often go untold, and their salaries suffer as a result.
