tbf, Caitlin Clark is the only WNBA player that’s profitable, and she’s kinda limited salary wise by the fact that the women’s league in general is not profitable and heavily subsidised by the NBA.
People will bitch about how the men’s league gets paid so much in comparison, then proceed to not watch the women’s league…
If you want it to make money YOU need to support it 🫵
This has always been my stance, Women make up approximately 50% of the population and the WNBA generates 2% of the revenue that the NBA does...
My wife and her friends go to some restaraunt once a month and they buy brand name workout clothes. Go to a game, buy a jersey, take your daughter and make it a thing.
So basically, "gender pay-gaps are fine, because the value of a woman is decided by the free market."? Fuck that capitalist drivel...
Tear down the entire sexist gender-segregated professional sports industry for illegal/unconstitutional gender discrimination and require professional for-profit sports be co-ed like every other industry in this country is mandated to be.
The fact that the NBA doesn't admit women should be grounds for dissolving the NBA as an illegal organization. The fact that the NBA and WNBA operate in-tandem while maintaining such an egregious gender pay-gap is proof of a conspiracy to discriminate against women.
Fuck the centuries of sexist tradition around sports. Just because it's the way things have been, doesn't mean it's the way it ought to be. I'm sick and tired of the sexism and sexist apologia. If you think women deserve less, I don't care what your excuse is, especially if your excuse is "the free market". smh...
This is a great response. If you want to support them, great! Donate, volunteer, watch their games, whatever. For the rest of us, it's an entertainment product. I don't watch WNBA because I don't watch NBA, or any sports. But if you like basketball, yet draw the line at the players' genitals, that's weird.
I don't know how so many people are so devoid of understanding of something that is such an integral part of human civilisation the world over.
People find something they like. Let's say is basketball. They like playing the game and want to be better so like watching people better than them so they tend to watch the best. Then they also find out they like watching it for entertainment sake. But anyone that has ever watched kids play sport know watching lower quality sport rapidly decrease in entertainment value.
Why would you go actively out of your way to watch an inferior product?
There are so many amateur male athletes that are better than female athletes. But no one goes down to their local game and watch a load of randomers play sport.
People watch the top league usually the club and the international if that sport is international. Then they will watch not their favourite team but other teams to get a better idea of the league. Then they will watch the feeder youth league if they want to. Then other countries leagues or lower leagues. All of these link together and all of them will be a better level than top women's league.
Usually at the point you run out of time to watch any more or you just like sport in general and go watch the top tier of another sport.
There needs to be a reason to watch and the only reason I have found to watch women's sport was to watch the UFC because that's a player on player sport not achieving something. But the women have a lot less power and a lot more flexibility so the strategy is entirely different and sport looks different. In that sense in that entertainment value men can't achieve that, in all other sports men seem to do what women do but better.
It's totally unfair to use Caitlin Clark as an example of the pay disparity as well. She's a rookie on a pay scale. Her salary is less than half the average wnba salary. What's really crazy to me is that the average salary is about 150k with only one woman making over 250k. For the salaries to be that flat seems odd compared to other pro sports but it's just a part of the W having less revenue. Athletes have very strong unions also.
Is bill burr on lemmy?
I'm gonna bet that corporate executives are bigoted assholes and increases in profits won't substantially go to the women players.
The WNBA is currently operating at a loss.
Players in the WNBA are unionized and if and when the WNBA starts turning a profit they will be compensated.
To put things in perspective, the WNBA makes less than 1% of the revenue of the NBA. They got a long way to go before they're making anything near to what the NBA players make.
In Brazil, is even more common now to people gather to watch the women football national team, not at the level of the men one, but there's even companies where they close up when any of the two teams play, to give people opportunity to see the game.
I don't like watching basketball (love playing it, though), but oddly enough I know of more people that go to WNBA games than NBA games, which comes to think of it seems odd. Maybe the seats are a lot less expensive...
You can sometimes buy season tickets to the WNBA for the price of similar single-game NBA seats.
Why does nobody watch the women’s leagues? Is it because nobody else does? can’t have all the social aspects of sports if nobody else is doing it.
Imo, they need to stop the segregation. Ditch the women’s leagues, but keep the games and teams. Have both teams play in one league, and contribute to the overall score of the team.
It’ll add new strategy to the seasons. Spend all of your budget on the dudes and hope they keep winning despite the ladies; build a strong women’s team to carry your b-tier men’s team; or something in between.
This results in zero women playing sports.
I wish so much that the top women athletes were above the replacement level. It would create so much interest, we could all root for these women. It would be a benefit in terms of equal rights arguments when you could point to a woman being better at a sport than the men.
But unfortunately that's just not reality. Male replacement level players are better than the best of the best female players. Having women on a team means having a player that's below replacement level on the team. Meaning they could find a male player from a minor league team that could play better. This will never be a winning strategy.
There isn't really a rule that prevents women from competing at the top level in professional sports at the top level. There just isn't any women that can compete at that level. I remember around 20 years ago there was a woman goaltender that was really good and there were hopes she might be good enough to play in the NHL. Ended up not being as good as the male goalies in the minor leagues, so didn't make the cut to get to the NHL.
It's just one of those things where reality doesn't conform to what we want it to be from a political standpoint. Women's leagues exist (and should continue to exist) because if they didn't women wouldn't get to play sports. There's always thousands of men that are stronger and faster than the strongest and fastest woman. It sucks, but it's how it is.
People watch the NBA over the WNBA because they want to be the very best at the sport. It's not a segregation rule that prevents women from playing in the NBA, it's just that there aren't any women that make the cut. Same goes for most sports.
But in the end it isn't really a requirement to be the best at a sport to deserve equal rights. Sports are sports and it's not really that important that there aren't any women that make the cut at the top level of play. There's more important things to worry about.
Caitlyn Clark should launch her own merch store or something.
They built a gender segregated system where all of the marketing and airtime goes to the men's side. It's an industry where women get less than 1% of the pay that the men did for the same job.
This system is so deeply ingrained, it is a fundamental part of our higher education system, where it benefits men 100x more than women.
But it's my fault for not watching?
The corporate overlords thank you for redirecting the blame away from them.
There is no rule stopping women from joining the NBA. It's just that no woman currently is able to compete at the highest level when men are included; the whole point of the WNBA is that, without it, there are no professional women in the sport.
In other words, it's not the same job: one is an NBA player, the other a WNBA player. The WNBA exists precisely because women can't do "the same job" but there is a market for watching women do the job. It's just not as big as the market for people playing at the highest level of competition.
The reality is that if the market were bigger, they'd make more money. Help make the market bigger. Be the change you want to see in the world.
The WNBA is a marketing line item for the NBA. If the NBA didnt give the WNBA their hand out, the WNBA wouldn't exist.
You do know that professional sports is considered part of the entertainment industry, right? This is like you insisting that Margot Robbie and Christian Slater should be paid the same because they do the same job.
Nope.
There is no rule preventing a woman from playing in the NBA. The NBA created the WNBA and has marketed it heavily in an attempt to get more women interested in the sport. Sure there's a long term profit motive (more women watching basketball could make them some money) but the WNBA has operated at a loss for decades. But maybe next year will be the year it turns a profit!
Boycotting the WNBA doesn't get women into the NBA, more the opposite. It's just screwing over women basketball players because of false assumptions.
Part of me says the real solution is to stop paying people $12m a year to throw balls around, but then again compared to the amount the people who own the teams and league get, shits chump change.
It's not that they throw a ball around really well, it's that the NBA brings in over 10 billion in annual revenue because of these players. How much are you willing to pay someone to bring in that amount of money?
If anything, more athletes need big paychecks to more evenly distribute wealth from the top. Anything to drive that money into the hands of others.
The first change needs to be teams pay for their own stadiums instead of them being taxpayer funded from cites and states. I don't care if it will drive tourism, use that money to take care of the purple in the city and make the city a nice place, even make it a nice place for a stadium, but make the team owners/pro leagues pay for their own damn stadium.
Those paychecks for athletes don't go up unless the owners' paychecks go up even more, unfortunately.
Sure but if someone paid you $12m a year to throw a ball around, would you take it?
If another team offered you $13m would you change teams?
If everyone else is getting paid $12m, can I just pay you $50k?
Also if the entire NBA colluded to reduce everyones pay by $1m per year, every year, would that be fair and reasonable?
Well that's the thing. The team is going to make $X in revenue, so who should get that money? The owners or the players? People are paying to see the players not the owners.
Besides that, achieving equity by pushing people down rather than raising people up seems like the wrong way to go about it.
That's nice but unfortunately the real solution is A.
This reminds me of how well I can do algebra and calculus but need to whip out the calculator for the tip.
Tips are easy. You move the decimal point (10%) and double (20%). Or find 10%, half of 10% is 5% and add that 5% to whatever 10% was for a 15% tip. And fudge the numbers to make the math easier when it makes sense to, it's a tip not a math test.
You're going to far. 0% of any sum is 0
Easy for you to say! You don't have scrambled eggs for brains. 😜
What are you guys talking about? Tip is just rounding up to banknotes-only. €37.25? You pay 2x€20.
why doesn't she just play in the NBA?
In NBA history, only 1 female player has ever been drafted- Luisa Harris. She did not actually make the team though, or anyways she never played in a game. I don't quite remember. The door is open for women to play-the NBA does not prohibit it, nor do any of the "men's leagues"-it just never happens because women are not good enough.
The WNBA's revenue of $70 million is what percent of the NBA's revenue of $10 billion?
And how much of The profitability of that industry is owed to state sponsorship, tax breaks, and Monopoly exceptions?
Professional sports needs to learn how to pay its own bills before it can be used as an example of why women's sports aren't profitable.
A whopping 0.7%!!
Is that... Nick Kroll and John Mulaney?
Oh, hello
Nick Kroll does not look impressed. Then again, he never does.
either way, that would buy a lotta tuna.
This is the real reason why I think trans women should be able to play women's sports: Nobody really gives a fuck about women's sports.
Except maybe women, but they don't really count as people, right?
Victor Wembanyama lol, sounds like the PES version of Victor Wanayama
