Women are back to demanding equal pay in sports again

in hive-121930 •  4 years ago 

If only the story of the simple economics about how people generally do not want to watch women's sports would sink in to the people who are complaining might have a second thought about this beef that comes up once every couple of years.


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How it is that people can't understand that Lebron James gets $40 million a year and the highest paid WNBA player gets barely over $200,000 to me is just really easy to understand. I'm gonna throw some names out there and you tell me if you have ever heard of them.

  • Skylar Smith
  • Brittney Griner
  • DeWanna Bonner
  • Cindy Parkson

Any of those ring a bell? Well for 95% of people it probably just sounds like names I made up, and one of them actually is a name I just made up. The other 3 are the 3 highest paid WNBA stars and generally considered to be the best in the sport.

The average salary of a WNBA player is well below what the men make but for anyone with a tiny bit of intelligence that realizes that these sports are driven entirely by advertising revenue and ticket sales, realize that if people don't go to the games and don't watch the games on TV, the advertisers are not going to advertise now are they? With no advertisers, there is no money to pass on to the players unless you think that sports can and should be a charity to give away money to people.


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This is the sort of attendance a WNBA game can expect

I get so tired of hearing these women athletes complain about some made up thing about how the "patriarchy" or the "system" is intentionally keeping them down and ignoring their sports. This is complete bullshit. No one is intentionally ignoring your sports, people don't watch them because the competition is just not that interesting compared to the men's side of things. It is time to acknowledge that this is the case.

You want to know one place where women are paid quite a lot and make nearly as much as men and for some of the best players they make MORE than most of the men in the industry (I'm not gonna say porn but that is almost certainly true). The answer is tennis and it is one of the few sports where the action on the women's side of things are just as good as the action on the men's side.

This isn't to say that they are equal though because men ranked 200th or so would probably wipe the floor with most of the women in the top 10 in the world.


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This is kind of "proven" when the Williams sisters who still had heads filled with beads and hearts full of confidence said they wanted to prove they could beat men around the rank of 200. Someone named Karsten Braasch overheard this statement and at the time happened to be ranked 204th in the world after dropping for years in the rankings at one point reaching 40th. He was definitely on his way out but thought it would be fun and accepted the challenge.

There are very few images of the event because the press was not allowed in for the most part and smartphones didn't yet exist but here is how it went. Braasch played a round of golf that morning, and during the matches, where he played both sisters back to back, he was drinking beer and smoking cigarettes between points and during breaks. He also didn't really even look like a professional athlete anymore. No matter, despite not really taking the event seriously and probably being a bit drunk, he defeated Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2.

The point of this is not to tell women that they should not be playing sports. I think that everyone should play sports but we gotta get off this PC train because it is only going to lead to bad things as far as sports in general are concerned. If these outspoken women doing all the complaining right now get their way, some politician is going to force the leagues to have some sort of equal pay rules and this will not be financially possible. What will end up happening in that situation is that team owners of WNBA teams will simply close the team down and what will the complaint be then? Are we going to force every club that has a men's team to also have a women's team? Then force them to pay the players equally?

It is an absurd argument and if any of these pundits were to simply look at the situation for what it is - and economic impossibility - maybe they would calm the eff down and just be happy that they get to play a sport for a living. There's a lot of people that have to go to a cubicle for a living, maybe they should get paid as much as the execs for professional sports teams also? I mean they do both work in offices so it's the same thing right?

I'll leave you with a funny meme that came out during covid blocks of attendance at games


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