Salary Disparities for Women in

SportsElizabeth Rockett

Women in Management and LeadershipWashington State University

Did you know!?

The average WNBA player salary is only $72,000 a year

The average NBA salary is $5.15 million a year

Rookie Salaries

The average NBA rookie who places first in the draft makes $4,592,200 his first year of play.

While the average WNBA rookie who places first in the draft makes a mere $49,440 her first year of play.

The maximum pay a WNBA player can receive is $105,000 a year.

There is no maximum pay for NBA players.

Currently the highest paid player in the NBA is Kobe Bryant who makes $23,500,000 a year.

Why is the wage-gap so large!?

• Reason: No support base• Explanation: The WNBA is not talked about in

the media the way the NBA is, which leads to a smaller fan base and less opportunity for the league to earn money for their brand. The reason the NBA has so many fans and therefor can pay their players the insurmountable salaries they are paid is because of the limitless media opportunities they receive.

WNBA players like Seattle Storm’s Lauren Jackson

now schedule’s her surgeries during the WNBA season so she can continue

to make money playing overseas where women are paid more equally to

men.

Why do WNBA players play overseas in the off-season?

Plain and simple, money talks.

Lauren Jackson averages to make at least $1 million playing overseas a

season verse the maximum salary of $105,000 a year in the WNBA

We live in a society where, as of 2013, women were still only making 78 cents for every dollar earned by men which is a gender wage gap of 22%.

This gender gap absolutely plays a part for women in

professional sports.

Now let’s look at the wage-gap in the Ultimate Fighting

Championship (UFC)

Jon Jones who has won the

UFC Light Heavyweight title

multiple times has an average pay per fight of

$400,000 win-or-lose

Ronda Rousey who has won

numerous back-to-back title fights as a

Bantamweight Fighter in the

UFC only makes $120,000 a fight, but only $60,000

if she loses

Notice the pay difference?

Some will say this pay difference is because men fights bring in more viewers. But at least within the UFC that statement would be false.

Ronda Rousey’s first Bantamweight Championship fight verse Liz Carmouche raked in 450,000 viewers via paper view. These numbers were the highest within the UFC for any fight they have ever had.

These viewership ratings were not just for championship fights.

In the UFC’s television show “The Ultimate Fighter” the latest season had women and men fighters, all vying at a contract together.

When viewership ratings were released there were 791,000 viewers for the episodes with the women fighting, but only 650,000 viewers for episodes with the men fighting.

That is a total of 21 percent more viewers for the women fighters

With the obvious viewership increases for female fighters over their male

counterparts, why are women in the UFC still making less then men?

The answer could be as simple as pay discrimination due to gender.

In the UFC, the women are bringing in better numbers then the men, yet still they are making less. Are the women perhaps not marketing their contracts in the way their male counterparts are? Do they have less of a fan base on social networking that could be causing this?

The answer is no and no.Jon Jones the UFC Light Heavyweight Champion only has 609,000 Instagram followers, compared to Ronda Rousey’s 965,000.

Jon Jones has 1,665,342 “likes” on Facebook. While Bantamweight Champion Ronda Rousey has 2,145,686 “likes”.

Obviously the numbers show that if you put both champions head to head, Ronda Rousey has the better

networking capability through social media compared to her male counterpart.

Yet, Ronda Rousey is still paid less.

Now lets compare soccer…

Vs.

MLS (Major League Soccer), which is the men’s league, makes an average salary of $207,831 a year.

The NWSL (National Women’s Soccer League) makes an average salary of $15,000 a year.

Did you know the poverty line in The United States is anyone

making under $23,283.

That means the average NWSL player makes $8283.00 below poverty level.

While the average MLS player makes $184,548 above poverty level a year.

By women growing up in an environment where they are

considered less than, it leads to them not asking questions and not

demanding fair pay. We as a society need to create a world

where we treat men and women equal. Where there is no gap in

pay for the same job because one person working is female.

To build long-term development of women, it can only be made possible

by equal opportunity.

To generate this change we must work to ensure that the programs created in professional sports as well as amateur sports are created equal and work to

promote women’s advancement.

• We must develop frameworks to follow and analyze impacts that different decisions have on gender.

• We also must form leaders in sports, such as coaches who agree that women should be treated equal and who do not allow any negative statements within their organization to the contrary.

The moment we do this we can transform how women are seen within societies bounds, we can forge an upbringing for young girls where they live a life without hearing justified sexism

as a reason they cannot play a sport. By establishing this environment we can establish

a future of true equality.

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