What the conversation about Caitlin Clark’s pay gets wrong
Penner/USA Today Sports/Reuters
New YorkCNN —
Caitlin Clark, who lifted women’s college basketball to new heights, became the leading scorer in NCAA basketball history, and was taken as first pick in the WNBA draft this week, will make a $76,535 salary this year.
The top NBA pick will make a $10.5 million salary — 137 times more than Clark.
Clark’s salary compared to top National Basketball Association players is drawing attention to Women’s National Basketball Association players’ pay and the often massive gender gap in professional sports salaries. The highest-paid WNBA player made a $242,000 salary, while the league minimum salary in the NBA is over a million dollars in 2023.
The WNBA’s stars aren’t asking to be paid an equal dollar amount to NBA players, however. Not right now, anyway. They acknowledge the reality of being in a league with a smaller pool of revenue to go around, and one that is a lot younger — without 50 preceding years of contract negotiations and the subsequent hard-won worker protections and salaries that come with that longevity.
What they want is more an issue of fairness, they say.
We are not asking to get paid what the men get paid. We’re asking to get paid the same percentage of revenue shared,” Las Vegas Aces star Kelsey Plum said in an interview in 2022.
Women receive around 10% of the WNBA’s overall revenue, while the NBA collective bargaining agreement gives players 50% of revenue, according to David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University and author of an upcoming book on women and sports.
Even the top athletes in the WNBA sometimes risk danger to play in overseas leagues — where there is no salary cap and players can make up to double or triple their US salary — in the WNBA’s off-season to supplement their income.
The star center for the Phoenix Mercury, Brittney Griner, was headed to Russia to play in the WNBA’s offseason in 2022 when she was wrongfully detained in Russia for 10 months. Griner was eventually released as part of a prisoner exchange. (The WNBA says it has been investing to ensure that players stay stateside in the off-season.)
Rookie salaries and player contracts in both the NBA and WNBA are set by their respective leagues’ collective bargaining agreements with their players’ union. The agreements include an annual salary cap for teams — $136 million in the NBA and $1.5 million for the WNBA. But the NBA has what’s known as a “soft salary cap,” in that there are several exceptions that help players bring in more money. The WNBA, in contrast, has a hard salary cap, meaning there are very few exceptions.
What accounts for the big differences in pay?
