College basketball sensation Caitlin Clark will earn less than six figures in her rookie season with the Indiana Fever, reigniting the debate over whether professional female athletes in the United States are paid fairly.
Clark, this year No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft, will have a starting salary of $76,535 and will earn approximately $338,000 over the four-year contract she signed with The Fever. The second, third and fourth picks in this year’s draft will also earn $76,535 their first year, according to league collective bargaining. agreement. The base annual salaries of the four athletes will only see a modest increase over the next few years: $78,066 in 2025, $85,873 in 2026 and $97,582 in 2027.
Lower-ranked WNBA draft picks earn less, according to a salary scale outlined in the players’ agreement with the league. Players are also entitled to end-of-season bonuses, depending on their performance. For example, the “Rookie of the Year” award comes with a bonus of $5,150.
The WNBA did not immediately respond to CBS Money Watchrequests comments on how it sets athletes’ salaries.
Clark’s earnings aren’t limited to her WNBA salary. She is expected to sign endorsement deals that will likely allow her to earn much more than the five figures she gets playing basketball. Already, his image and likeness are estimated to $3 million, a figure expected to rise, while she has already done television commercials for advertisers such as Gatorade, State Farm and Nike.
Still, Clark’s base salary pales in comparison to his NBA counterparts. Rookie Victor Wembanyama, the top pick in last year’s NBA draft, earned more than $12 million for the 2023-24 season, his first year in the NBA, according to Spotraca site that tracks sports statistics. His salary is roughly equivalent to that of a New York-based first-year or junior attorney at a national law firm, according to a posting on the job site. Indeed.
While some online commenters expressed surprise at Clark’s salary, President Biden spoke out Tuesday on the issue of pay disparity in sports.
“Women in sport continue to push new boundaries and inspire us all. But right now we see that even if you are the best, women are not getting their fair share,” he said. declared in a press release. job on X (formerly known as Twitter). “It’s time we give our daughters the same opportunities as our sons and ensure women get the pay they deserve.”
Certainly, what female athletes “deserve” is up for debate. The NBA was founded decades ago and generates billions of dollars every year. The WNBA, on the other hand, was launched in 1996 and is much smaller, generating an estimated $200 million in annual revenue, according to a report from Sports only for women.
On the issue of individual player compensation, “there’s not an endless pool of money that they have to deal with,” Greg Bouris, a sports management professor at Adelphi University, told CBS MoneyWatch , adding that the WNBA must significantly expand its revenue so that player salaries increase. “It’s a question of economics.”
And as big a star as Clark has been for college basketball, she remains untested in the professional arena, he noted. This is part of the reason the NBA and WNBA place caps on rookie salaries.
“They come to play against the best basketball players in the world and they still have to prove themselves,” Bouris said. “Success at one level does not guarantee success at the other.”
Likewise, Clark is expected to add considerable flavor to the league, as she did in helping the women’s NCAA tournament draw a a larger TV audience only men.
“She will lift all boats”
“She comes in with all this momentum in earned media coverage for the WNBA, so the league has an opportunity to capitalize on that. She has a huge economic impact,” Bouris said. “She’ll lift all boats.”
The Women’s Sports Foundation, an advocacy group for women in sports founded by tennis legend Billie Jean King, has pointed to the WNBA’s relatively low salaries as a reason why top players often compete overseas for the American League offseason to supplement their salary. Including WNBA star Brittney Grinerwho was imprisoned in Russia while he played there and who had already remarked in a interview that “the only reason many of us go overboard is the wage gap.”
The WNBA has made progress in promoting pay equity in recent years. While NBA players collectively receive about 50% of the league’s revenue, WNBA players previously earned less than 23%. But that figure increased to 50% thanks to the latest labor agreement with the league.
Yet the wage gap in professional basketball and most other sports remains, with only female tennis players achieving some measure of equity. In the NBA, the minimum salary for a rookie for the 2022-23 season was $953,000according to Spotrac.
Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, said that while she considers Clark to be underpaid relative to her skills, many WNBA athletes are as well.
“It’s a structural problem, and you can’t look at salaries in isolation or compare them to what men earn, because there are stark differences,” Armstrong told CBS MoneyWatch, pointing to the enormous revenues generated by the NBA, compared to the WNBA. .
Bottom line: For WNBA player salaries to increase, the league will need to strike bigger broadcast deals, secure more lucrative corporate sponsorships and sell more tickets and merchandise. But Armstrong identified the current cultural moment as a potential turning point for the league.
“(We) have little boys socialized to believe that women’s sports are important,” she said. “We see them walking around wearing jerseys with the names of female basketball players on them.”
And there’s no denying Clark’s star power.
“Caitlin Clark’s impact is real. There is an energy and dynamism that is touching the WNBA like never before,” Armstrong said. “If we can get a huge increase in ticket sales for all WNBA teams, more merchandise sales, more media exposure and more people investing, we will start to see movement in revenue.”
