Fan Better, Boys

The concluding sentence of Mary Pilon’s homage to economic ignorance points at us.

Now it’s on fans to pay attention.

To be fair, more you (if you follow basketball) than me, since I’m not really a fan. But either way, Pilon’s dot connections are clear: the reason Brittney Griner in in prison in Russia is because you suck at being fans.

The economics stateside for female hoopers are abysmal. Top male college basketball stars may pursue multimillion-dollar careers in the N.B.A. Women who possess comparable talent fare differently. The maximum W.N.B.A. base salary for the 2022 season was about $228,000. The salary of Stephen Curry, the highest paid N.B.A. player last season, was almost $46 million, which means the highest paid man earned roughly 200 times what his woman counterpart did for a similar job.

That isn’t a glass ceiling — it’s a glass stratosphere. In one of the most public workplaces in the world.

Granted, in this age of “equality or bust,” there can be no reason other than sexism why a man is paid more than a woman to do the same job. Often, the comparison is false, the jobs aren’t the same, there are significant differences that easily explain pay differentials, but here, that’s clearly not the case.

The game is basketball and the job is putting a round orange ball through a ten foot high hoop, while preventing the other team from doing the same. Man or woman, or whatever descriptive word one chooses, it’s the same gig. So what else could it be other than sexism that they aren’t paid the same?

One of the common refrains to explain away the American basketball pay gap is that the W.N.B.A. is a newer league than the N.B.A., founded in 1996, compared to the N.B.A.’s origination in the 1940s.

It’s unclear what’s meant here by “common,” as I’ve never heard this before, though I might not be a good example of common when it comes to gender pay disputes.

Yet by crunching the numbers for pay between the N.B.A. and the W.N.B.A. at the same period in their life cycles, the professors Nola Agha of the University of San Francisco and David Berri of Southern Utah University found that W.N.B.A. players were paid less even after accounting for the age of the league.

So it’s got nothing to do with the maturity of the leagues, even if America was fairly familiar with the concept of basketball before the WNBA was formed. So what, then, could it possibly be?

“It can sometimes explain systems in place that cause completely different outcomes,” Professor Agha said in an interview. She added: “You have a century of people not used to spectating women’s sports because in so many ways it was belittled and shut down and questioned. And then we go to the current time frame and you see underinvestment.”

There’s a little bias trick in there. Something that went unstated, and was merely glossed over, but can’t be if one wants to be remotely honest about this. The assumption is that people want to watch sports, in general, and basketball, in particular, whether played by women or men with equal interest. The reason, Professor Agha assumes, that this isn’t in fact happening is that we “belittled” women’s sport causing people to be “unused” to watching it. And then comes the proof.

The real cash infusion in sports has come from television. The W.N.B.A.’s television deal with ESPN pays about $25 million per year, compared with the N.B.A.’s total combined $24 billion for its deals with ESPN and Turner Sports, which wrap after the 2024-25 season.

Consider also the literal space in which people watch women’s sports. There is only one — one! — sports bar in the country, perhaps in the world, devoted exclusively to women’s sports, the Sports Bra in Portland, Ore.

Can you imagine all those dopey bar owners across the country losing big bucks hand over fist by not dedicating their “bras” (oh, come on, that’s pretty uplifting) to women’s sports? Pilon apparently believes this is how economics works, that the problem is that the failure of supply has caused there to be no demand.

Limited television exposure in the United States not only makes it hard for fans to follow the games, or find them in the first place, but also fuels the pay gap. Smaller TV contracts mean smaller paychecks for players. Creating a culture of fandom around women’s sports can’t happen overnight and needs effort from fans, leagues, sponsors and media stakeholders.

This op-ed was superficially about Griner, but it really wasn’t. Rather, it was about the pay gap in women’s sport, and sought to lay out the economics of professional sports backwards as if to shame you, the putative basketball fans who love watching the big guys on the court but have been denied the opportunity to similarly adore their femininish counterparts such that women’s sports has been prevented from establishing a fan base that will give rise to huge cable contracts, tons of women-only sports bars and no future need to go to Russia to earn a buck in the off-season and get busted for forgetting to clean out the hash oil from your vaping thingy.

Ultimately, it’s you fans. You. You are responsible for Brittney Griner’s imprisonment because you have allowed big-boy-sports to deny you sufficient opportunity to love big-girl-sports just as much. Why can’t you be more like the Russian oligarchs who appreciate tall women?

And if you don’t clean up your television viewing habits at sports bars, you never know what bad things will come of it.