The Sports With the Biggest Gender Pay Gap

We knew that Caitlin Clark’s pro basketball salary would be far less than a comparable male player’s pay. However, it might be worse than we expected.

As a player, Clark will earn close to $76,000. Last year, her male counterpart was signed for $12.2 million:

Equally infuriating, the combined pay of Clark’s whole team, Indiana Fever, is approximately the same as one average “back bench” NBA player.

The disparity, though, is not unusual.

The Sports Gender Pay Gap

Looking beyond basketball, we would see more evidence of the sports gender pay gap through Adelphi University’s summary:

The one exception is tennis where average athlete compensation is relatively close. The top prizes at the four major tennis tournaments are the same for the men and the women. Correspondingly, on the Forbes top-ten list, the women were all tennis players.

But still, when we compare Naomi Osaka at $51.1 million and Serena Williams’s $41.3 million pay package to Lionel Messi’s $130 million and LeBron James’s $121.2 million, the top paid athlete gender pay gap remains massive.

Our Bottom Line: Sports Equality

The fight for equal pay was, at first, a participation battle. Focusing on equal funding, that too was about money.

Years ago, cheerleading and square dancing were the sports we associated with young women while only one in 27 high school girls participated in athletic programs. Then, by 1998, because of Title IX of the Education Amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the ratio skyrocketed to one in three.

Signed by President Nixon in June 1972, the law mandated gender equity in all federally funded school programs. Sports, though, with the greatest gender disparity, felt the biggest impact.

Since the 1990s, girls’ participation in high school sports continued to increase:

In her study of Title IX’s impact on female human capital, University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson looked at education and the workplace. For education, she concludes that women who participate in athletic programs attend school longer and have higher rates of college attendance. At work, their wages are higher and they are more likely to enter occupations that are associated with men. Furthermore, she hypothesizes that female athletes enjoy the byproducts of sports participation. They develop abilities that the market values and have the positive reinforcement from coaches, friends and family that foster self-esteem.

As a result, we could also say,

My sources and more: Thanks to my Axios newsletter for inspiring today’s post. Then, happily, I discovered this Adelphi University report that had the up-to-date pay facts for each sport. And finally, dated but surely still accurate Dr. Stevenson’s NBER paper and this NY Times article detailed the impact of Title IX.

Please note that econlife (in 2010) previously published parts of today’s description of Dr. Stevenson’s Title IX research.