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 US are paid fairly.
Clark, this year No. 1 draft pick in the WNBA, will have a starting salary of $76,535 and 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 make $76,535 their first year, according to the league’s collective bargaining agreement. The annual base salary for all four athletes will see only modest increases in the coming years: $78,066 in 2025, $85,873 in 2026 and $97,582 in 2027.
Lower-ranked WNBA draft picks earn less, according to a pay scale set in the players’ agreement with the league. Players are also eligible for bonuses at the end of the season, based on performance. For example, the Rookie of the Year award comes with a $5,150 bonus.
The WNBA did not immediately respond to CBS MoneyWatch’s request for comment on how it sets athlete salaries.
Clark’s earnings are not limited to her WNBA salary. She is expected to sign sponsorship deals that will likely result in her earning much more than the five figures she gets for playing basketball. Her name image and likeness are already valued at $3 million, a figure that is expected to rise, while she has already made TV commercials for advertisers such as Gatorade, State Farm and Nike.
Still, Clark’s base salary pales in comparison to her NBA counterparts. Rookie Victor Wembanyama, the first pick in last year’s NBA draft, earned more than $12 million for the 2023-2024 season, his first year in the NBA, according to Spotrac, a site that tracks sports statistics. Her salary is roughly equal to that of a first-year or junior New York-based attorney at a national law firm, according to a post on job site Indeed.
While some online commentators expressed surprise at Clark’s pay, President Biden addressed the issue of pay disparity in sports on Tuesday.
“Women in sports continue to push new boundaries and inspire us all. But right now we see that even if you are the best, women don’t get their fair share,” he said in an after on X (formerly known as Twitter). “It’s time we give our daughters the same opportunities as our sons and ensure women get what they deserve.”
To be fair, what female athletes “deserve” is up for debate. The NBA was founded decades ago and generates billions of dollars annually. The WNBA, on the other hand, launched in 1996 and is much smaller, generating an estimated $200 million in revenue annually, according to a Just Women’s Sports report.
On the issue of compensation for individual players: “There’s not an endless pool of money that they have to deal with,” Greg Bouris, a professor of sports management at Adelphi University, told CBS MoneyWatch, adding that the WNBA is making its operations meaningful needs to grow. income so that player salaries can increase. “It comes down to economics.”
And as great as Clark has been in college basketball, she remains untested in the professional arena, he noted. That’s part of the reason why both the NBA and WNBA have caps on rookie salaries.
“They come to play against the best basketball players in the world and still have to prove themselves,” Bouris said. “Success at one level does not guarantee success at another.”
Likewise, Clark is expected to make a significant contribution to the league, as she did by helping the women’s NCAA Tournament achieve success. larger TV audience then the men.
“She’s Gonna Lift All Boats”
“She comes in with all this momentum in the media attention for the WNBA, so the league has an opportunity to capitalize on that. She has a huge economic impact,” Bouris said. “She’s going to 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 relatively low wages in the WNBA as a reason why top players often compete abroad during the U.S. league’s offseason to match their salaries. to fill. That includes WNBA star Brittney Grinerwho was imprisoned in Russia while playing there and who previously noted in an interview that “the whole reason why a lot of us are going over is the pay gap.”
The WNBA has made strides in promoting pay equality in recent years. While NBA players collectively receive roughly 50% of the league’s revenue, WNBA players previously took home less than 23%. But that figure rose to 50% under the latest labor agreement with the league.
Yet the pay gap persists in professional basketball and most other sports, with only female tennis players achieving a degree of equality. According to Spotrac, the minimum rookie salary for the 2022-2023 season in the NBA was $953,000.
Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sports management at Michigan University, said that while she views Clark as underpaid relative to their skills, so do many WNBA athletes.
“It’s a structural problem, and you can’t look at salaries separately or compare them to how much the guys are making because there are big differences,” Armstrong told CBS MoneyWatch, noting the enormous revenue the NBA generates compared to the W.N.B.A. .
The result: To keep WNBA player salaries rising, the league will have to land bigger broadcast deals, secure more lucrative corporate sponsorships and sell more tickets and merchandise. But Armstrong identified the current moment as a potential turning point for the league.
“Caitlin Clark’s impact is real. There is an energy and vibration that touches the WNBA in a way that has never been achieved before,” she said. “If we can see a huge increase in ticket sales for all WNBA teams, more merchandise sales, more media attention and more people investing, we will start to see movement in revenues.”
Megan Cerullo
