Ending the Gender Pay Gap Debate

Ladies and gentlemen, I swear to you that I have other topics to write about. In fact, I started writing an article on morality of homosexuality. My writing process was interrupted by a brand spanking new love letter from the feminists of the world who did not read my last article about the gender pay gap – click here to read it if you haven’t already.

Okay, so something interesting, at least on the surface level, came across my proverbial desk. Today, we will dive deep into the world of basketball. You do not have to know a single thing about the good old sport of basketball to understand the main point of this article. Scratch that, you literally do not have to have even seen anything related to basketball in your life to understand this article. Not even the god damn ball.

Even if you don’t know anything about basketball, you have probably heard the name Lebron James. He is a very famous dude and probably the most famous currently active basketball player. He is 2 meters and 6 centimeters tall and weighs somewhere around 113 kilograms. Big motherfucker. He has won the NBA championship 4 times. Every time he won the title, he was the most valuable player in the finals. He also has 4 regular season most valuable player awards. He’s played in the all-star game 17 times thus far. The dude is one of the greatest players of all time. That is probably the reason you’ve heard of him.

Let me throw another giant at you – Sue Bird. You all know Sue? Right??? Anyway, Sue Bird is the Lebron James of the WNBA. She has been in the league for just as long and has the same number of championships. However, something horrible happened last year. Please take a look at the image below.

Does this cause a strong, visceral emotional reaction?

Must be sexism. Right? Let’s examine that claim, shall we? In 2020, the WNBA generated a lot of revenue, 60 million US dollars. Impressive. In comparison, the men’s competition, the NBA, generated 7.4 billion US dollars in revenues in 2020 alone. Yes, the pandemic year. I know that the human brain sucks at comprehending such absurdly large numbers so let me help you out. 60 million is less than 1% of 7.4 billion. You can multiply 60 million by 120 and you still wouldn’t have 7.4 billion. That being said, not all NBA players get paid as much as Lebron. More than a hundred of these players earn less than a million with some earning as low as 25,000 and 50,000 US dollars.

There are also some sport-specific differences. Women are playing with a smaller ball and also they are playing shorter games. The total roster size is different. Oh and the WNBA has had a grand total of 22 dunks as of October of 2020. That is 22 dunks in the history of the sport. Male high school players dunk more times in a game or two. Simply put, the female side of the sport is a different product. It is, as far as the entertainment value is concerned, an inferior product. The average attendance attests to this. The average NBA game sees around 18,000 live spectators while the female games see an average of 6,800. The market also determines the ticket price and there are some huge differences on this front too. The average ticket price in the WNBA is around 17.5 US dollars while the NBA boasts a crazy average ticket price of 90 US dollars. Just compare that for a second. That is a five times difference. With an attendance of 6,000, an NBA game would generate 540,000 US dollars in revenue, compared to 105,000 that a WNBA game would generate. However, it doesn’t end there. Live attendance is one thing, there is also TV and online viewership. WNBA games average around 231,000 viewers watching from their homes compared to 15 fucking million people watching NBA games. What does this mean? Advertiser revenue. If you have viewership of 15 million people, that is incredible real estate for placing your advertising material if you are one of the bigger companies like Nike or Coca-Cola or a car manufacturer or Apple or some other corporate monstrosity. I reckon I could get ad space for this website during one of the less exciting WNBA games. Kidding obviously.

Naturally, this is subject to change. Popularity of any sport can increase or decrease and with those shifts in popularity so would pay. Fighters like Amanda Nunes and Ronda Rousey or someone like the great Serena Williams (tennis player for the uninitiated) all earned incredible sums of money by generating interest. They were winning fight after fight or match after match until they became undeniable. They were at the pinnacle of their sports (Amanda still is) and they were successfully putting asses in front of screens (again, Amanda still does) which helped them amass great wealth.

So no, the “gender” pay gap in American basketball has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with quality of product and the market’s response to said product. With these two articles, I am officially ending this nonsensical debate. If you want to help the world and people in it become more productive then just do this simple thing - stop feeling through problems, start thinking through problems. This will help get us to the point where we don’t even have the pointless debates such as this one.