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The world of professional sports is a realm often portrayed with glitz and glamour, with superstars making millions and millions dollars in salary per year, on top of the endless millions advertisers pour into the pockets of athletes such as Tiger Woods, Peyton Manning, and Dwayne Wade. Even the less known professional athletes often times make more than enough to make ends meet. The base salary in Major League Baseball for any player is $250,000, which is a salary Bentley graduates hope to obtain after years of hard work in their careers, while NFL, NBA, and even NHL salaries are quickly catching up. However, not all of those who are making the professional ranks are enjoying the lifestyle of the rich and famous.
To be blunt, the female professional athlete is the one not getting wet from the rain of cash soaking the sports world. Now, some cynics remark that female sports don’t draw enough crowds or entertainment to rein the cash in. The WNBA is fairly new league, as it has only existed for a little over a decade, but the current team salary cap is measly $750,000 a year. The current NBA salary cap is just shy of $45 Million dollars, which is, in essence, sixty times larger than the WNBA cap. That’s about as much as Kobe makes every two games in the NBA, and the amount A-Rod makes per three game series. There are coaches making more than that a year in the MLB, NFL, NBA, and even the NHL. The highest paid players in the sixteen team league make approximately $95,000 a year. That should be read again: the HIGHEST paid players in the Women’s National Basketball League make $95,000 a year. That is about sixty thousand dollars less than Alex Rodriguez makes PER GAME in a single season. How can that be considered at all fair?
National statistics released by the US Census Bureau in 2007 reported that the average woman in this country makes about $.74 to every dollar made by a male of the same position or level as far as employment, which shows a clear discrepancy in wages for the genders across the board, but the sports gap is absolutely staggering. The media pays attention to college female athletes, televising their basketball and softball national championship tournaments, but there is far more media attention paid to male athletes in their respective sports. Out of a recent poll conducted by the USA Today, it was noted that the average sports fan could not name more than two teams in the WNBA or more than three female professional athletes. There is no argument to counter the fact that much more media hype is tied to the Men’s Division I Tournament than to the Women’s, as the television ratings were far higher for the Men’s Second Round games than for the national championship for the women. Beyond Mia Hamm in the late 1990′s with her Gatorade commercials, the Williams sisters in the early 2000′s, Anika Sorenstam, and Maria Sharapova, no professional athletes have received significant mainstream attention, and to be frank, these women were the best of in their respective sports. Sharapova, who is has been the highest paid athlete overall over the last few years, rakes in about $20 million a year through her multiple endorsements, and this is considered extraordinary income. Meanwhile, LeBron James, who is considered by most as the future of the NBA, not only makes $63 million from his NBA contract over four years, but has a Nike endorsement worth $90 million over seven years, a shoe line, clothing line, and makes regular appearances for number of organizations that earn him anywhere from $500,000 to two million per appearance, and this is the typical money made by a male superstar.
That begs the question: Why does the world not care about female athletes? Why are they so under paid that the highest moneymakers of the female sporting world are often incomes less than $10 Million a year? In a culture where women are expected to be beautiful and slender, researchers who have spent years delving into this subject matter at universities across the nation have remarked that the masculinity that is so often associated with athletic competition is a major factor. In short, our society spend too much time thinking that sports are a male activity and that women who play sports fall into the masculine column, which is, as one Harvard researcher noted: “repulsive.” Millions of young women currently participate in sports programs ranging from children athletic organizations to gigantic university programs, and none of them can look forward to the same massive salaries that their male counterparts have come to expect.
But there is some good news: The WNBA has officially announced that senior players in their league, meaning they have five seasons of experience or more, now enjoy the luxury of having their own hotel rooms on road trips. Talk about progress.
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