Income Gender Gap For Athletes

Abstract:

The gender wage gap right now is as prevalent in the United State as ever, although in recent years it has shrunk, but women still make significantly less than men. In this paper I will focus on the gender wage gap amongst athletes and examine the possibilities for the gap in income.

Income Gender Gap For Athletes The income of professional athletes have been a popular debate for the past twenty years due to the exponential growth of their income accompanied with a rise in cost to attend sporting events. The growth of female athletes’ salary has also been very large, but they still make significantly less than male athletes. There are several factors that affect the gap in earnings such as larger revenues in men leagues because of a larger demand for men’s sports and other factors that may include discrimination. Athletes throughout the world are known for being extremely highly paid, some athletes such as Tiger Woods have net worth’s approaching a billion dollars. The salary of professional athletes has come a long way in recent years; with the help of labor unions they have gotten a fair portion revenues unlike athletes in the past when owners got almost all revenues. Female athlete’s salaries have increased but not at the extreme rate that men’s have. Tiger Woods is the highest paid male athlete in the world with a salary that includes endorsements he made 100 million dollars, (Freedman 1) but the highest paid athlete tennis player Maria Sharapova only made 24.5 million dollars (Badenhausen 1). This brings the question, is the 75 million dollar difference in earnings legitimate of is it derived from discrimination? The first question that arises is what has caused there to be gender gap in income for so long? When women were originally hired in traditionally male jobs they were hired at a lower rate, because as recently as thirty-five years ago it was legal to do so. That is now accepted as a social norm, that they should be paying women less than men (Giampetro-Meyer 347). There have been laws put in place in the last fifty years that have been passed with the intent of prohibiting discrimination and promoting equitable economic and educational opportunities for all persons, regardless of gender. The result, unfortunately has not been an elimination of the gender wage gap, but only a slight decrease still leaving the gender wage gap which means to this day women are not getting fair treatment with regards to wages in the workplace (Guthrie 90).
With athletes this may seem hard to quantify when the highest paid female athlete made more money last year than most Americans will make in their entire lifetime, but even with amount of money Sharapova made last year Tiger Woods still made more than twice what she made. With this discrepancy there has to be an explanation that could be discrimination or men’s athletics just generate more revenue’s therefore are paid more.
There are number of reasons why a male athlete’s salary could be higher, but the main argument is the simple economics of the situation. It is no secret that men’s sports generate much more revenue than women’s sports, and that is going to dictate the salaries. It is not feasible to pay a female WNBA basketball player 20 million dollars like a top NBA player would make because the WNBA’s revenues pale in comparison to the NBA’s. Each of these leagues are separate entities so there is no revenue sharing between the two leagues, therefore if a WNBA team wanted to pay someone that amount of money they would have increase their revenues to the amount of the men’s leagues in order to justify that.
Contrary to public belief the salaries in professional sports are not sex driven, but performance driven. Men’s athletics are more popular, more people attend games and they have a large fan bases that lead to lucrative television contracts. Television networks do not give these contracts for any reason other than ratings, they do not care what is in a time slot as longs as it leads to a large audience and makes money for them. If the WNBA had a following as large the NBA there is no doubt that they would also have lucrative contracts that would lead to larger salaries. Sports like everything else in the world is a business, every league is trying maximize their profit along with the television companies (McCafferty).
There is discrimination going on in every industry in the United States including sports. There is no doubt that women are being discriminated upon in some sort of form but men are as well, it is impossible to eliminate discrimination one hundred percent from any industry. Sports are a unique industry, unlike most jobs where the employee is dispensable this simply is not the case in sports. People want to see the best athletes in the world so team owners have no choice but to pay them the fair market value or they will lose the viewers as well as their revenue stream. So while discrimination may be going on in sports it is not affecting the gender wage gap, if Maria Sharapova wants to make as much money as Tigers Woods than simply find a way to generate the revenues he does.

Works Cited

McCafferty, Joseph. “The money bowl: the real competition in big-time college sports is over who can spend the most.” CFO, The Magazine for Senior Financial Executives. (2006): 1-3
Guthrie, Sharon. “Female Athletes Do Ask! An Exploratory Study of Gender Differences in the Propensity to Initiate Negotiation Among Athletes.” Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal. 18.1 (2009): 90-101
Giampetro-Meyer, Andrea. “Recognizing and remedying individual and institutional gender-based wage discrimination in Sport.” American Business Law Journal. 37 (2000): 343-386
Badenhausen, Kurt. “The World's Highest-Paid Female Athletes.” 3 Aug 2010. Forbes. 24 April 2011. <http://abcnews.go.com/Business/worlds-highest-paid-female-athletes/story?id=11447513>
Freedman, Jonah. “The 50 highest-earning American athletes.” 2009. Sports Illustrated. 24 April 2011. <http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/more/specials/ fortunate50/2009/ >