A Look at Inequality in Sports Pt. III

Buckle up, friends and foes, the grand finale is here.

In part one, I talked about how women are portrayed in the media and given less credit than their male counterparts. In part two, I talked about the mistreatment of female athletes and dispelled some rumors about female anatomy. So what’s left? The pay gap, of course!

Let’s start with some startling facts. From BusinessInsider, “members of the women's [soccer] team received a $75,000 bonus for winning the 2015 Women's World Cup. If the men were to ever win a World Cup, their bonus under the current structure would be more than four times larger at nearly $400,000.”

Holy fish sticks, Batman, that is a huge gap! But wait! That’s not the end of it; this is an industry-wide practice.

The same scandalous pay gap happens in tennis too.

Take a look at Serena Williams, easily the No. 1 tennis player in the world. She is the only tennis player to ever get a golden career grand slam in singles and doubles. She boasts 23 Grand Slam titles.

To say that Williams is the best of the best is an understatement. She is the best.

For the men, the top tennis player currently is Novak Djokovic who has 15 Grand Slam titles.

The two are separated by eight titles, but what about the money?

According to Forbes, Djokovic makes $1.5 million in winnings and $22 million in endorsements. Williams makes $8 million in winnings and $19 million in endorsements.

So not much of a difference in money but let’s look at another contender: Roger Federer.

Federer, who ranks third in ESPN’s Tennis ATP Rankings, makes $12.2 million in winnings and $65 million in endorsements.

Now hold up. The man in third place makes the most money of all of them? How does that make any sense?

This is common practice, people. And as much as it breaks my heart, it happens in hockey too.

Let’s look at the gross disparity in the salaries of players in the NWHL and the NHL, and for good measure, I’ll even throw in the ECHL to show just how disgraceful the gap is.

The National Women’s Hockey League, or NWHL, was established in 2015 and can barely afford to pay their players. In its inaugural year, the organization paid its players between $10,000 - $26,000.

However, recent budget cuts slashed that amount in half, and now the players will only be making between $2,000 - $10,000.

Even the tippy-top $10,000 salary is barely more than a part-time employee’s yearly wages.

Check the numbers: the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. While the definition of “full-time” can vary between businesses, full-time is typically anywhere between 32 - 40 hours per week. So part-time would be anything less than 32 hours.

For my calculations, I used a 20-hour workweek.

Taking the minimum wage ($7.25) multiplied by 20 hours gives you $145 a week. Multiply that number by 52 weeks in a year, the average yearly income for part-timers is around $7,540.

So the highest-paid female hockey players barely make more than someone working a part-time job at the local slop shop.

And a lot of these women are Olympians by the way.

For example, Kendall Coyne Schofield, two-time Olympian, plays for the Minnesota Whitecaps. While her actual salary hasn’t been disclosed, we can assume she’s one of the women making only $10,000 and her net worth is approximately $1 million depending on your source. I used networthstats.com for the estimated $100,000-$1 million net worth.

For comparison, the lowest-paid player in the NHL is Matt Irwin with a salary of $675,000.

Mind you, there's a multi-player tie of lowest paid, but I'll use Irwin for the sake of comparison.

His net worth? $32 million.

I’m not saying this guy isn’t any good, but even the lowest-paid player in the NHL makes significantly more than a two-time Olympian female hockey player.

So the top player in the NWHL makes less than 1% of the salary of the lowest-paid player in the NHL.

But you know what really adds salt to the wounds? The salaries of ECHL players.

If you’re unfamiliar with minor league sports, no worries. ECHL is still a professional league, but barely (I love you Cyclones, don’t be mad at me).

It goes ECHL - AHL - NHL. The ECHL is the farm team to the farm team of an NHL team.

On average, these guys get paid $600 weekly with some veterans making about $1000 weekly. According to paysa.com, the average player makes about $18,000 annually.

These guys are minor leagues and yet they make $68,000 compared to the professional women’s league (full of Olympians) who make $10,000?

And obviously, these women are just as good as the men since, you know, they’re Olympians. And some of these women have even performed right alongside the men.

In the 2019 NHL All-Star Game, Schofield became the first woman to ever participate in the skills competition. She placed seventh in the fastest skate competition beating out Arizona Coyote’s Clayton Keller.

Coyne skated the course in 14.346 seconds and most of the guys were convinced she won including the winner of the competition, Connor McDavid.

“When she took off, I thought she might have won, the way she was moving,” McDavid said.

McDavid skated the course in 13.02 seconds.

So even with women proving themselves to be worthy adversaries against men, there’s still a vicious cycle of them being treated unfairly. The media hardly covers any of their amazing feats and this then trickles down into how they are paid.

Unless you’re on twitter or have an interest in women’s sports, how much do you hear about them? I’ll admit, the only reason I know what’s going on in the NWHL is that I follow the teams on Twitter. I’ve never seen any kind of coverage on major networks.

In fact, if you take a look at ESPN’s or Sportsnet’s websites, they don’t even have a section on women’s sports. ESPN has a tab for women’s basketball, but it’s towards the bottom of their menu.

Sportsnet doesn’t have a single section specific to women. Even searching for stories on women’s leagues, it still gets watered down with stories about men.

Check it out: another example of agenda-setting. People aren’t being exposed to women’s sports so no one is going to pay them any mind.

You can physically see how little people pay attention to these sports if you look at their attendance.

The average attendance for an NWHL game is around 861. An NHL game gets 17,377 people per game.

WNBA games get 7,716. The NBA nets about 17,849.

MLS gets 13,756 and the National Women’s Soccer League boasts 7,386.

So a lack of media attention means a lack of attendance. A lack of attendance means a lack of revenue. A lack of revenue means you can’t pay your players.

It’s a sadistic cycle.

There you have it. Female athletes don’t get equal airtime, treated like delicate flowers so they don’t hurt their baby-making abilities, and get paid practically nothing. Have your own theory on this phenomenon? Let me know in the comments down below!