Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sports4Equality
Wage inequality in professional sports is something that has interested me for a while. It seems strange to me that female athletes aren’t paid as well as male athletes. Females are able to play the same sports as males, so it seems odd that they aren’t compensated nearly as well for playing those sports. Take professional basketball for example. In the WNBA, the women’s league, the average annual team salary is $900,000 and any individual player is capped at $101,000. In the NBA, the men’s league, the Houston Rockets, the team with the lowest annual salary, pays its players almost $48,000,000. Even the lowest paid player on the Rockets makes $473,000 per year, almost five times as much as the best-paid female player in the WNBA. This discrepancy only gets worse when you consider the higher paid teams and players. The Los Angeles Lakers annual team salary is over $100,000,000, and they pay Kobe Bryant alone over $27,000,000. This means that Bryant, the highest paid male player, makes almost 270 times as much as the highest paid female player. In fact, since the WNBA only has twelve teams, Bryant makes more than twice as much as every player in the WNBA combined.
