Earning Less Than Benny the Bull
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I’ve spent a lot of time over the last week thinking about basketball, and specifically about Caitlin Clark.
Superlatives aren’t necessary. The statistics speak for themselves.
Clark is the leading scorer in the history of U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball. She was taken as first pick in the Women’s National Basketball Association’s draft this month. She’s helped attract record-breaking TV audiences. Arenas have sold out around the country because of her.
She’s 22 years old and has just signed her WNBA contract. She will earn a salary of $76,535 this year. Not bad for right after graduating, but by my calculation it’s about 7.3 percent of the salary that will be earned by the top pick for the NBA (that’s the Men’s National Basketball Association). Absurdly, Newsweek last week reported that Atlanta Hawks' mascot, Harry the Hawk, makes $600,000 each year. The Chicago Bulls’ Benny the Bull pockets $400,000.
I have nothing particularly profound or insightful to add to all of this information other than that it’s shameful. But I do think it’s important to make crystal clear exactly what the issue is here. This is not about the absolute wage gap. Indeed, it rarely is. The reality of the sports landscape is that the WNBA’s total revenue pool is still dwarfed by that of the NBA. What this is about, is fairness.
“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 with the publication Just Women’s Sports a couple of years ago.
What she’s talking about is that women receive around a tenth of the WNBA’s overall revenue, but the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement gives their players half of revenue, David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University and author of an upcoming book on women and sports, explained to CNN.
CNN also reports that rookie salaries and player contracts in both the NBA and WNBA are determined by their respective leagues’ collective bargaining agreements which are made with the players’ union. And these agreements also include an annual salary cap for teams. It’s $136 million for the NBA and $1.5 million for the WNBA. Here’s something else interesting though: the NBA has what’s known as a “soft salary cap,” in that there are several exceptions that enable players to bring in more money, CNN reports. But the WNBA has a hard salary cap: there are basically no exceptions.
So yes, the egregious gap between Caitlin Clark’s pay and that of the NBA top pick is a product of legacy—the result of a history of women’s sport being marginalized, downplayed and outright ignored. And that attitude toward women’s sport has for decades been deemed in some way acceptable. But it no longer is, and we also can’t absolve ourselves of the responsibility to fix the mistakes of those who came before us. The world has changed.
Of course it’s going to take time, but it’s out duty to evolve with it. We need to talk about Caitlin Clark, the injustice of her compensation and the extent to which the playing field is still anything but even. Education sparks resistance and ultimately progress.
(On a related note, here’s a piece I did for Forbes on pay inequity in women’s soccer a few years ago.)
It was (according to some) the best of times for women’s sport; it’s was also still the skimpiest of times for women’s sport.
“My hoo haa is gonna be out.” That’s how Tara Davis-Woodhall, an American who placed sixth in the long jump at the Tokyo Olympics, responded last week when she saw Nike’s Team USA track and field kit designed for the Paris Games which are taking place this summer.
And she has a point. The women’s uniform has a very high-cut pantyline, making me question not only the decency but also the comfort of the garment. “They are absolutely not made for performance,” U.S. steeplechaser, Colleen Quigley, reportedly told Reuters, in reference to the briefs. Others had even more to say, with Lauren Fleshman, a U.S. national champion runner, penning the following on Instagram next to a side-by-side image of the men’s and women’s uniforms, annotated with the label “Patriarchy 2024”:
Professional athletes should be able to compete without dedicating brain space to constant pube vigilance or the mental gymnastics of having every vulnerable piece of your body on display. Women’s kits should be in service to performance, mentally and physically. If this outfit was truly beneficial to physical performance, men would wear it. This is not an elite athletic kit for track and field. This is a costume born of patriarchal forces that are no longer welcome or needed to get eyes on women’s sports.
“I’m queer and I’m attracted to female bodies, but I don’t expect or enjoy seeing female athletes or male athletes put in a position to battle self-consciousness at their place of work. That is not part of the job description. I lived that life and know that excellence is born of unselfconsciousness, of freedom and embodiment of action and instinct. Stop making it harder for half the population @nike @teamusa @usatf.”
I particularly applaud her assertions that “excellence is born of unselfconsciousness” and would be inclined to imagine that those tasked with designing and approving clothes for people whose job it is to be physically excellent in their chosen discipline would agree. And yet, it seems that this might not be the case.
In recent years there has been something of an evolution in the designs of uniforms at the highest echelons of sports—an move towards functionality and away from, well, whatever word you might use to describe unnecessarily revealing outfits.
As the Guardian reports, Germany’s women’s gymnastics team wore full-length bodysuits at the most recent Tokyo Olympics. That, the team said, was an explicit stand against sexualization in the sport. Gymnastics New Zealand earlier this month updated its attire rules to allow women and girls to wear shorts or leggings over their leotards.
In a way, I’m encouraged both by the number of people who have spoken out about the ultra-revealing Nike uniforms, but also by the humorous undertone in some of the complaints: Davis-Woodhall’s reference to her “hoo haa”; Fleshman’s to “constant pube vigilance.”
Considering how far we’ve come in women’s sports—the progress we’ve made toward recognizing women athletes as the remarkable and profoundly accomplished professionals they are—it’s ludicrous and absurd that no one involved in the uniform design process thought to perhaps suggest that these skimpy briefs might in some way send the wrong message to the athletes, to spectators, to everyone. Surely the uniform we mandate someone to wear is the most overt way of communicating how much we respect that individual—how we want them, their value and their identity to be perceived by society at large.
“Wait, wait,” one single person at Nike might’ve said. “Do you think that, considering the #MeToo movement/high scale gender pay gap related lawsuits in sport/sexual abuse scandals in the world of gymnastics/a general common awakening to the fact that all genders deserve unconditional and equal respect, we should maybe…I don’t know…rethink our approach to uniforms that might be considered sexualized? Maybe add an inch or two to the pantyline?”
My hope is that in a few years we’ll look back and remember this as a cringe-worthy faux pas: that time Nike forgot that empowerment in women’s sports was in, and that ultra-revealing clothes whose skimpiness serves no obvious athletic purpose were out.
On an entirely different note, I want to spend some time this week celebrating something that happened earlier in April that I haven’t had the chance to write about yet.
Mae Krier, a 98-year-old resident of Pennsylvania, who I profile extensively in the first chapter of my book, received a long (long!) overdue acknowledgement of her brilliance and steely commitment to getting women’s’ war efforts recognized.
Krier was a Rosie the Riveter, part of a six million-strong cohort of women who worked in the paid U.S. labor market during the war, proving in many cases unequivocally that women were just as capable at doing jobs that up until that point had squarely been the domain of men.
As soon as Krier started work building B17s at Boeing in Seattle in 1942, she was hooked on the feeling of empowerment—of being financially independent and of explicitly contributing to the American economy. But just a few years later, she witnessed an unceremonious snap-back to the way things had always been: women belonged in the home raising children. Paid work was for men.
In the years that followed, women’s labor force participation first dipped back to close to where it had been pre-war, before inching higher, eventually fueled by important legislative changes, cultural progress and—crucially—easier access to reliable and affordable birth control.
Some Rosies re-entered the workforce, especially as their children grew older. Many relished the new employment rights that were being bestowed upon them—the right to not get fired for getting pregnant, for example, and the right to qualify for credit despite their gender.
But for a many, resentment lingered also: Rosie had been robbed. The image of her persona, a brave and perky representation of a wholesome, conscientious lady, exuding patriotism and immortalized by Norman Rockwell, was celebrated the world over as a symbol of feminism, but the real Rosies were still owed something. Their valiant willingness to uproot their lives in the collective interest of keeping America going, hadn’t been acknowledged. Neither had the sacrifices so many of them felt that they had made when peace dawned.
On Wednesday, April 10, Krier and a group about two dozen of her contemporaries gathered in Washington D.C. to accept the Congressional Gold Medal in painfully overdue recognition of their wartime efforts.
In front of a crowd of about 600, Krier expressed her emotions: “Up until 1941, it was a man’s world. They didn’t know how capable us women were, did they?” She said. “We’re so proud of the women and young girls who are following in our lead. I think that’s one of the greatest things we’ve left behind, is what we’ve done for women.”
At a time when the gender pay gap remains persistent and systemic, Rosie’s medal ceremony is a joyful reminder of the progress we have made.
It’s an acknowledgment of the injustice of undervaluing, marginalizing and trivializing a woman’s contribution, not just to an economy, but to a society at large—to a country. And it also ignites hope that by beginning to rectify the mistakes and oversights of our past we can more effectively consider where we’re still falling short today. Those shortfalls are numerous.
We stand on the shoulders of the Rosies, the brave, brash and brazen nonagenarians and centenarians who—even without the legal and policy assurances we enjoy today—proved that gender is not, and never should be, a barrier to economy potential or professional ambition. It should never be an obstacle to happiness and fulfillment.
As the assault on women’s reproductive rights continues, representing a war on our economic rights too, it can feel hard to muster a sense of anything even akin to optimism. It can seem naive to subscribe to the idea that the moral arc of history really does bend toward justice. But we owe it to ourselves to remain hopeful. Hope fuels progress and keeps us going. Mae Krier and her fellow Rosies waited long enough for their acknowledgment. They would certainly agree.
If you want to know more about Mae, watch the fantastic PBS NewsHour segment about her life, my book and some of the other characters who I’ve had the pleasure of reporting on, here:
It’s been another great week of book talks and recovering from a whirlwind trip to London during which time I talked a lot about the book, drank a lot of tea, and didn’t sleep nearly enough.
It was fantastic to visit the New York offices of the World Economic Forum and to do a handful of other virtual and in-person events including for Oracle’s women’s network.
On Thursday, I had the extremely surreal pleasure of being a guest on Good Morning America’s GMA3. There’s nothing quite like telling millions of Americans they never got an adequate history education because no one bothered to teach them about Pauli Murray and Katharine Dexter McCormick.
And you can watch the full segment here.
Specially thanks to the man who contacted me on social media after the segment aired to propose marriage, based on my accent. Respectfully, I’m going to have to decline.
One final, shameless request. If you’ve read the book, I would massively appreciate it if you could take just 30 seconds to post a review on Amazon using this link. If Goodreads is your jam, that’s just as great and you can leave a review it here. Thank you so much for your support, as ever!
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