Let’s drop the state sponsorship of professional men’s sports and sporting arenas down to the level that we give to the women’s teams and see how those salaries look in a couple of years…
The entire business model of professional sports requires socializing the cost of infrastructure through subsidizing the transportation, location, and logistics and exempting every one of these monopoly wealth getting schemes from labor laws, antitrust, and public review.
The NBA, NFL, MLB, etc are a scam And they need to learn how to pay their own bills.
tbf, Caitlin Clark is the only WNBA player that’s profitable, and she’s kinda limited salary wise by the fact that the women’s league in general is not profitable and heavily subsidised by the NBA.
People will bitch about how the men’s league gets paid so much in comparison, then proceed to not watch the women’s league…
If you want it to make money YOU need to support it 🫵
This has always been my stance, Women make up approximately 50% of the population and the WNBA generates 2% of the revenue that the NBA does…
My wife and her friends go to some restaraunt once a month and they buy brand name workout clothes. Go to a game, buy a jersey, take your daughter and make it a thing.
So basically, “gender pay-gaps are fine, because the value of a woman is decided by the free market.”? Fuck that capitalist drivel…
Tear down the entire sexist gender-segregated professional sports industry for illegal/unconstitutional gender discrimination and require professional for-profit sports be co-ed like every other industry in this country is mandated to be.
The fact that the NBA doesn’t admit women should be grounds for dissolving the NBA as an illegal organization. The fact that the NBA and WNBA operate in-tandem while maintaining such an egregious gender pay-gap is proof of a conspiracy to discriminate against women.
Fuck the centuries of sexist tradition around sports. Just because it’s the way things have been, doesn’t mean it’s the way it ought to be. I’m sick and tired of the sexism and sexist apologia. If you think women deserve less, I don’t care what your excuse is, especially if your excuse is “the free market”. smh…
If people don’t watch, then there’s fundamentally no money to be given to the players. If you want money to be given to the player, you need to watch.
That’s how it works for women’s sports, and that’s how it works for men’s sports as well.
Pay for all athletes is dictated by the viewership they bring in, not their performance. WNBA players actually make disproportionately more relative to viewership.
You honestly talk like someone who’s never watched a sport in their life.
The fact that the NBA doesn’t admit women should be grounds for dissolving the NBA as an illegal organization
The NBA, like most pro sports leagues, has no rule preventing women from trying out. They’re already co-ed. The NBA doesn’t admit women because they don’t beat men in try-outs.
That last sentence is a bit misleading, women aren’t trying out for the NBA left and right. There also is a massive cultural barrier there, some of the best wnba players could likely play in the NBA and yet it hasn’t happened. I think someone would have to be willing to sacrifice their wnba career to try it out. If the person that does this isn’t built physically for it, it could paint a negative perception for years to come. Thus far it’s just been easier to keep separate. I do think we will see women start to enter sports dominated by men in the coming years though.
“Some of the best players in the wnba could likely play in the NBA…”
As an avid NBA fan (occasionally watch wnba) this is absolutely not true. Golf, Nascar, Tennis, yeah. It’s more likely to happen in the NFL than it is in the NBA though, because specialists positions like kicker. The NBA, players are required to play both offense and defense. For a woman to have both the pure athleticism to be competitive with the best 500 male basketball players in the world? Not an impossibility but she’d still likely be bench depth and seen as a pr motivated move. That level of nba player gets paid, maybe, 3x the top paid WNBA player but it’s give and take with potential endorsements etc.
Height and muscle mass obviously make a difference. But it’s important to note that uncoordinated, weaker, or shorter men all find roles in the NBA. So the argument people make that women can’t match up seems suspect. No one is saying Caitlyn Clark will be able to play like LeBron in a decade, but when she hits her prime she could absolutely fit a role on an NBA team, not as a starter at her size unless she bulks up. I think especially with the newer batch of wnba players coming in it will be hard to argue that at least the top 20 wnba players couldn’t fit roles in the NBA. (But most won’t because they’ll make more money on endorsements as stars in the wnba)
Women get bullied around playing against men in a way that is just not apparent when they play with women. I can’t speak for basketball too much but whenever I have played against the best girls in football the different in strength is astronomical. Someone like me who’s not great at football but always been athletic the effort to overcome that strength difference is too much. A women could have way more skill and ability than me, yet that gap is smaller than the advantage I have with strength and even speed.
Sure but Steph Curry in his first year got absolutely bullied because he was tiny and weak and still threw up points. I’m skinny and not very strong, I got bullied in basketball, but had I had better handles I could have found a role. I could shoot, rebound, block and guard despite the disadvantage, I couldn’t dribble with a skill level that would get me anywhere though. I played thousands of hours of basketball in my life. I don’t think people understand where value really lies in the game. Plenty of players in the NBA look uncoordinated and weak and somehow carve out significant roles. Because they’re tall, or good 3 point shooters, or talented at rebounding, etc. I fail to see how talented women couldn’t carve out roles in the NBA.
I also think it’s worth noting that most women, even in sports, are strongly culturally discouraged from bulking up. As soon as a woman is strong enough to bully her peers she is accused of being a man. As things change, even though women don’t have the muscle mass of men, some women will bulk up enough to compete as much as they need to. A lot of this stuff is far more cultural than people want to admit.
We are just going to have to disagree on this. There no way I think women can compete at that level and unless they do something like play an u16 team and lose to prove it the discussion probably won’t go anywhere.
So basically, “gender pay-gaps are fine, because the value of a woman is decided by the free market.”? Fuck that capitalist drivel…
Pay differences between different groups of performers are fine, because you can’t pay more than you bring in in revenue and be sustainable. The WNBA makes 2% as much as the NBA and also gets subsidized by the NBA (as in the NBA pays the WNBA to be a thing).
Tear down the entire sexist gender-segregated professional sports industry for illegal/unconstitutional gender discrimination and require professional for-profit sports be co-ed like every other industry in this country is mandated to be.
Every “men’s” sports league in the US allows women to compete, presuming they can compete at the same level. This is rare because of the general differences in height, weight and upper body strength between men and women, which are exacerbated when you start talking about professional athletes as they tend to be on the tail of the curve for those things.
Only women’s sports leagues discriminate with respect to sex. Same as competitive chess, amusingly. This extends down to the school levels too, where a girl that wants to play a sport with only a boys team must be allowed to try out and make the team if she can perform at the requisite level but a boy wanting to play a sport with only a girls team is simply SOL as according to Title IX policy the former is sex discrimination but the latter is not.
The existence of women’s sports is a form of protectionism.
Fuck the centuries of sexist tradition around sports. Just because it’s the way things have been, doesn’t mean it’s the way it ought to be. I’m sick and tired of the sexism and sexist apologia. If you think women deserve less, I don’t care what your excuse is, especially if your excuse is “the free market”. smh…
Professional sports is only sustainable if the athletes are paid less than the total amount of revenue less the costs of equipment, facilities, etc. In the case of the WNBA, their regular revenue is something like 1/50th of the NBA, and the NBA additionally pays about $15 million per year as a subsidy to help keep them afloat.
So what is your plan to close that wage gap? You recognize that money exists and is important (otherwise you wouldn’t be angry over disparity in money) so how do we get the appropriate amount of money to these women.
The WNBA makes less than $100 million in revenue. The NBA makes over $10 billion. It’s bringing in less than 1% of the revenue of the NBA. Do we take money from the players in the NBA to subsidize players in the WNBA?
Would it be fair to the players in the NBA that people are paying a lot of money to go see? Like if I spend $500 to see LeBron James play, then $250 of it goes to pay someone I didn’t even see play… is that fair?
If another league starts up that doesn’t take away players salaries, don’t you think all the best players would go to that league? Then both the NBA and WNBA don’t exist anymore.
You’re throwing out a lot of rage but no real solutions. There probably isn’t one. People pay more money to see the top players. The top players are men. It’s unfair, but at the end of the day, it’s just sports. It’s nothing to get upset over.
They built a gender segregated system where all of the marketing and airtime goes to the men’s side. It’s an industry where women get less than 1% of the pay that the men did for the same job.
This system is so deeply ingrained, it is a fundamental part of our higher education system, where it benefits men 100x more than women.
But it’s my fault for not watching?
The corporate overlords thank you for redirecting the blame away from them.
There is no rule stopping women from joining the NBA. It’s just that no woman currently is able to compete at the highest level when men are included; the whole point of the WNBA is that, without it, there are no professional women in the sport.
In other words, it’s not the same job: one is an NBA player, the other a WNBA player. The WNBA exists precisely because women can’t do “the same job” but there is a market for watching women do the job. It’s just not as big as the market for people playing at the highest level of competition.
The reality is that if the market were bigger, they’d make more money. Help make the market bigger. Be the change you want to see in the world.
You do know that professional sports is considered part of the entertainment industry, right? This is like you insisting that Margot Robbie and Christian Slater should be paid the same because they do the same job.
There is no rule preventing a woman from playing in the NBA. The NBA created the WNBA and has marketed it heavily in an attempt to get more women interested in the sport. Sure there’s a long term profit motive (more women watching basketball could make them some money) but the WNBA has operated at a loss for decades. But maybe next year will be the year it turns a profit!
Boycotting the WNBA doesn’t get women into the NBA, more the opposite. It’s just screwing over women basketball players because of false assumptions.
Players in the WNBA are unionized and if and when the WNBA starts turning a profit they will be compensated.
To put things in perspective, the WNBA makes less than 1% of the revenue of the NBA. They got a long way to go before they’re making anything near to what the NBA players make.
This is a great response. If you want to support them, great! Donate, volunteer, watch their games, whatever. For the rest of us, it’s an entertainment product. I don’t watch WNBA because I don’t watch NBA, or any sports. But if you like basketball, yet draw the line at the players’ genitals, that’s weird.
I would think that the kind of people who watch NBA, would want to watch the WNBA.
It’s the same concepts, but with women. I would think the mostly straight/male sports audience would want to watch their favorite sport where the players are also the gender they like to stare at.
Have you ever seen a WNBA game? Sure, it’s the same sport but that logic applies to middle school basketball teams as well and no one gives a shit about those either regardless of the gender of the athletes involved.
The reason professional sports are fun to watch is you get to see the best athletes in the world push the limits of what is physically possible for a human to achieve. Top level women cannot compete with top level men in any regularly televised sport, including basketball. No one wants to watch Caitlin Clark on channel 3 when LeBron James is doing way more impressive things on channel 6. That’s just the way it is. I don’t get why people pretend that isn’t obvious and get offended by it.
They should allow light gymnastics in the WNBA to even up the entertainment value. A series of backflips down the court before hitting nothing but net on a 3 would sure get my attention.
I don’t know how so many people are so devoid of understanding of something that is such an integral part of human civilisation the world over.
People find something they like. Let’s say is basketball. They like playing the game and want to be better so like watching people better than them so they tend to watch the best. Then they also find out they like watching it for entertainment sake. But anyone that has ever watched kids play sport know watching lower quality sport rapidly decrease in entertainment value.
Why would you go actively out of your way to watch an inferior product?
There are so many amateur male athletes that are better than female athletes. But no one goes down to their local game and watch a load of randomers play sport.
People watch the top league usually the club and the international if that sport is international. Then they will watch not their favourite team but other teams to get a better idea of the league. Then they will watch the feeder youth league if they want to. Then other countries leagues or lower leagues. All of these link together and all of them will be a better level than top women’s league.
Usually at the point you run out of time to watch any more or you just like sport in general and go watch the top tier of another sport.
There needs to be a reason to watch and the only reason I have found to watch women’s sport was to watch the UFC because that’s a player on player sport not achieving something. But the women have a lot less power and a lot more flexibility so the strategy is entirely different and sport looks different. In that sense in that entertainment value men can’t achieve that, in all other sports men seem to do what women do but better.
Football, baseball, hockey, or some other sport. Or maybe even some other form of entertainment not related to sports. People can be interested in more than one thing.
I’m not into basketball myself, but I do watch both baseball and hockey. The top level (MLB, NHL) in just those two sports have me covered year round.
Yea it is. Go find me a sport where top level women have played against boys and won? It’s happened in football and it’s happened in ice hockey and boys dominate. I fail to see how a sport that is arguably most about freak athleticism will result in a more even game.
It’s a different feeling watching a team compete to be the best in their league and watching a team compete to be the best in the world.
When MLB was shutdown early on in the pandemic, Taiwan was able to get their league going before MLB started up again. So I watched that. But when MLB startup up again, I stopped watching the Taiwan league baseball. It doesn’t mean I hate the Taiwan league, it’s just that MLB is a higher level of play, that’s the league “my team” plays in, that’s the league my team’s rivals play in. There’s an ongoing story of your team that you’re tuning in to see. They’re competing to be the best in the world by going up against the best in the world. Everything else is just a curiosity.
In Brazil, is even more common now to people gather to watch the women football national team, not at the level of the men one, but there’s even companies where they close up when any of the two teams play, to give people opportunity to see the game.
I don’t like watching basketball (love playing it, though), but oddly enough I know of more people that go to WNBA games than NBA games, which comes to think of it seems odd. Maybe the seats are a lot less expensive…
It’s totally unfair to use Caitlin Clark as an example of the pay disparity as well. She’s a rookie on a pay scale. Her salary is less than half the average wnba salary. What’s really crazy to me is that the average salary is about 150k with only one woman making over 250k. For the salaries to be that flat seems odd compared to other pro sports but it’s just a part of the W having less revenue. Athletes have very strong unions also.
Average NBA salary is about 10 million. So Wemby is getting paid like 120% the average in his league. Clark is getting about 50% the average in her league.
Why does nobody watch the women’s leagues? Is it because nobody else does? can’t have all the social aspects of sports if nobody else is doing it.
Imo, they need to stop the segregation. Ditch the women’s leagues, but keep the games and teams. Have both teams play in one league, and contribute to the overall score of the team.
It’ll add new strategy to the seasons. Spend all of your budget on the dudes and hope they keep winning despite the ladies; build a strong women’s team to carry your b-tier men’s team; or something in between.
I wish so much that the top women athletes were above the replacement level. It would create so much interest, we could all root for these women. It would be a benefit in terms of equal rights arguments when you could point to a woman being better at a sport than the men.
But unfortunately that’s just not reality. Male replacement level players are better than the best of the best female players. Having women on a team means having a player that’s below replacement level on the team. Meaning they could find a male player from a minor league team that could play better. This will never be a winning strategy.
There isn’t really a rule that prevents women from competing at the top level in professional sports at the top level. There just isn’t any women that can compete at that level. I remember around 20 years ago there was a woman goaltender that was really good and there were hopes she might be good enough to play in the NHL. Ended up not being as good as the male goalies in the minor leagues, so didn’t make the cut to get to the NHL.
It’s just one of those things where reality doesn’t conform to what we want it to be from a political standpoint. Women’s leagues exist (and should continue to exist) because if they didn’t women wouldn’t get to play sports. There’s always thousands of men that are stronger and faster than the strongest and fastest woman. It sucks, but it’s how it is.
People watch the NBA over the WNBA because they want to be the very best at the sport. It’s not a segregation rule that prevents women from playing in the NBA, it’s just that there aren’t any women that make the cut. Same goes for most sports.
But in the end it isn’t really a requirement to be the best at a sport to deserve equal rights. Sports are sports and it’s not really that important that there aren’t any women that make the cut at the top level of play. There’s more important things to worry about.
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