A foul injustice has been uncovered. In a plot hatched in the depths of Mordor, the Patriarchy struck again. It turns out that there’s a prominent profession in which women do not get equal pay for equal work. Guys (and dolls), male basketball players make far more money than female players do.
The women of the WNBA are mad, and they are not going to take it anymore—or at least they’ll complain about it. Here’s WNBA player Skylar Diggins-Smith, quoted in Wealth Simple ezine:
Players in the NBA get about 50% of the revenue. For women, the percentage is in the twenties. So before we even talk about base salary or anything like that, we don’t even get paid the same percentage of the revenue that we bring in, which is kind of unbelievable. People try to hijack this issue and say that women’s basketball may not be as interesting a game, because they disparage women in sports, period. But we don’t even make the same percentage of revenue! And jersey sales…we don’t get any of it. The men do. And I have had a top-five jersey for three or four years in the WNBA.
It truly is unbelievable—Skylar’s combination of ignorance and smugness. That little paragraph encapsulates the argument WNBA players have been making on social media, so let’s look at her assumptions in detail.
First, Mrs. Diggins-Smith compares percentage of revenue shared between the NBA and its players, which only makes sense if you don’t know the first thing about economics. The NBA makes money, lots of it, while the WNBA probably loses money, or makes very little of it. The players are asking a failing business model to fail more spectacularly. Why would the WNBA owners agree to do that seems to escape them.
Second, she pre-emptively uses moralistic shaming against critics—“because they disparage women in sports…” But the supposed moral failings of Twitter trolls do not matter here. She’s trying to distract.
The WNBA players real adversary is impersonal—consumer choice. Vastly more people spend time and money watching the NBA than they do watching the WNBA. The revenue for the NBA is about seven billion dollars a year; for the WNBA, the figure is perhaps fifty million. From that single fact everything follows.
