Growing fan interest doesn’t mean better pay for women athletes. Yet.
The WNBA draft isn’t typically appointment viewing. But this year, more than 2.4 million people tuned in. That’s four times the previous record. NCAA all-time scoring leader Caitlin Clark took the stage dressed head to toe in Prada after being selected first overall by the Indiana Fever.
Clark is already bringing fans, media attention and money to the WNBA even before the May 14 start of its regular season. Demand to see her play has sent ticket prices soaring and prompted some teams to move their games hosting the Fever to larger venues. Many fans have found that hard to square with her rookie season salary of $76,535. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that’s about as much as the average hotel manager, insurance adjuster or human resources specialist.
Not everyone is surprised. “Welcome to the party. We’ve been trying to figure this out for some time,” said Thayer Lavielle, executive vice president of The Collective, which advocates for women in sports and recently conducted an audit of the athlete pay gap.
“What we found was that women athletes make 21 times less [on average] than men athletes on the field of play,” Lavielle said. Many of those women need to boost their income with second jobs or by playing overseas.
In professional basketball, the gap is wide. NBA players make 108 times as much as their women counterparts, according to Lavielle. Of course, the NBA is 50 years older than the WNBA. It brings in billions more in revenue. The league has had more time to build a fan base and corporate partnerships. Its player’s association has had more time to negotiate a 51% revenue-sharing deal, far beyond the roughly 9% of revenue that WNBA players receive in salaries. Lavielle said the forces behind those disparities are entrenched.
“The flywheel is broken kind of at every spoke,” Lavielle said. “It’s a challenge from needing enough eyeballs in order to get the dollars. But in order to get the eyeballs, you need to get the dollars.”
Let’s start with the eyeballs problem. For decades, sports media was controlled by a handful of old-guard gatekeepers, according to Alicia Jessop, who studies the business of sports at Pepperdine University.
“And if you look at who the decision-makers are, they tend to be middle-aged white men,” Jessop said. “We all have implicit biases. If I’m a middle-aged white man, I might be more inclined to greenlight an NBA game or even cornhole than a WNBA game.”
The assumption that there was no audience for women’s sports meant they didn’t get primetime TV spots or coverage in sports magazines.
“Technology, streaming and social media, what it has done is it’s democratized media,” Jessop said.
Athletes and teams can now market themselves directly to fans, who can watch and engage with women’s sports more easily than ever. Jessop said savvy investors are starting to take note, but there’s a lingering problem.
“For so long, women’s sport has been treated like a charity case or a side project,” Jessop said. Investors might put a small amount of money behind an athlete or a league, then back off if they don’t see an immediate return.
“Leaders in this space don’t need to play scared,” she added. “What that means is you place your financial bet, but then you double down on it by spending appropriately on marketing and promotion so that your investment can make significant gains.”
Sort of like how investors have always treated men’s sports.
Jessop guesses it will take 10 years or more for growing fan interest to translate into multimillion-dollar salaries for the Caitlin Clarks of the world. But the true fandom and star power around Clark, Angel Reese, Kamilla Cardoso and others in this highly anticipated rookie class could help move things along.
“What a great time to be a fan of women’s basketball,” said Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan who attended this year’s NCAA Final Four in Cleveland.
“I talked to four men who lived on the other side of the country. And I asked them, ‘Who’s your team?’ and they didn’t have one. They were just there to watch women’s basketball,” Armstrong said. “We didn’t have that in the past. Now we have a critical mass of men, women, boys and girls saying, ‘Wow, women’s basketball is special.’”
More often in her decades living and breathing women’s sports, Armstrong has seen critics blame women athletes for revenue shortfalls and their low salaries.
“There was a time that people thought, ‘Yeah, women’s sports is an inferior version.’ The media records tell us that’s not the case,” Armstrong said.
She hopes the current wave of fan interest puts that conversation to bed and also puts a spotlight on the investment needed to pay women athletes something closer to what they’re worth.