Basketball Gender Wage Gap
- pbrizak
- Nov 25, 2016
- 2 min read
Just like in women's soccer and golf, women's basketball players experience the gender wage gap as well.
Diana Taurasi is part of the All-Women's National Basketball Association First Team and helped the Phoenix Mercury win the league's championship back in 2014. During that same winning season, Taurasi was paid the WNBA maximum salary of $107,500. Now that same season, the Phoenix Suns employed Dionte Christmas who only played for 198 minutes. For those 198 minutes, the only time he ever played in the NBA, Christmas was paid the league minimum of $490,180. Now if that wage gap isn't big enough, if we compare what Taurasi makes to an equivalent NBA stater and team star like Washington's John Wall, he makes $14.7 million-a-year. Now of course one might argue that these are unfair comparisons due to the fact that the NBA generates far more revenue than the WNBA. However, even when we consider differences in revenue, there still remains a significant gap between the wages paid to the WNBA players and their NBA counterparts.
When taking a look at the numbers and breaking them down, the WNBA has a broadcasting deal that pays the league $12 million per year and the average attendance in 2014 was 7,578 per game. According to the Handbook on the Economics of Women in Sports, it reports that average ticket prices in 2011 were $15. Given 204 total home games and assuming ticket prices haven't changed, if anything they've increased, total 2014 revenue in the WNBA figures to be at least $23.2 million. So, if we ignore revenue from all other sources and assume that the average ticket prices have not changed in four years, we can say that league revenue in the WNBA is at least $35 million. With a $35 million revenue and only paying roughly $11,550,000 altogether in WNBA salaries, it is sufficient to say that the leagues union essentially has given league owners all other revenue sources, which is not how it should be.
There needs to be some refining done to the WNBA salaries. I understand they do not bring in as much as the NBA does, but someone needs to figure out a way to allow them to. This is probably by far the largest wage gap in sports and someone needs to be done about it now.
Pictured above: Diana Taurasi
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