R ecently, female hoops hotshot Caitlin Clark’s WNBA salary leaked, causing Very Real Outrage.
Clark, who easily became the No. 1 pick in the 2024 WNBA draft after leading her University of Iowa team to two straight NCAA basketball championship games, is on pace to make just $338,056 over the next four years: $76,535 in 2024, an inflation-adjusted $78,066 in 2025, $85,873 in 2026, and $97,582 in 2027. When this was pointed out online by portals like Barstool Sports, a near-frenzy ensued.
Dozens of Twitizens and Facebookers described Clark’s wage as on par with what an engineer or a good teacher would make: “Wicked work,” opined one. Far more seriously, the U.S.A.’s one and only president, Joseph Robinette Biden — or his handlers — chimed in on the controversy. “Right now, we’re seeing that — even if they’re the best — women are not paid their fair share,” the POTUS noted on his Twitter/X account.
Not really. In fact, the situation here is complex and multivariate, and “woke” people are entirely wrong about it. First of all, professional athletes often make the bulk of their money from clothing- and product-endorsement deals, and Clark just signed a $28,000,000 (!) product-line deal with Nike . . . to include an Air Jordan–style “signature shoe.” Our Girl will, one suspects, be able to eat.
But also, and more seriously, Clark’s low base salary itself has basically nothing to do with “sexism” or “patriarchy.” In the business world, employee and executive salaries are based almost entirely on enterprise revenues and profits. How do those two core metrics look for the “W”? Not great, relatively speaking.
Per the highest estimate I have seen, from the number-crunching website Statista, the WNBA generates $200 million, or a bit less, in annual total revenues. Per a more typical estimate, annual league revenue is $60,000,000 — and average national in-person and television viewership per game is just 400,000. In contrast, the NBA grosses roughly $10,000,000,000 per year, and pulls in more than 12,000,000 eyeballs for major events like the league’s annual Finals.
As far as profits go, the ladies’ league has never seen any. Sportskeedia sums up the W’s net-gains situation thusly: “Since there has been minimal growth since its birth, many wonder if the league brings in any money. The answer to that question is no. Back in 2018, current NBA Commissioner Adam Silver spoke on the (WNBA’s) financial outlook. He cited that the WNBA has never once turned a profit. The league loses roughly $10 million a year, and lost close to $12 million in 2017.” In fact, an annual tranche of some $15 million from the men’s side of Mr. Silver’s business is one of the top two or three factors keeping the newer organization afloat.
To be rudely blunt, there is an obvious reason for this: Men are genetically far more athletic than women. To some extent, this is self-evident. Almost all “men’s” sporting leagues are in reality open leagues — perfectly willing to take on any female (or intersex, etc.) athletes good enough to make the cut and compete. Yet there has never been a female competitor in the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, or Major League Soccer (although let me add a quick shout-out here to Nancy Lieberman, who made it through multiple rounds of NBA cuts, played for the Los Angeles Lakers summer team, and was at one point one of the top 500 or so hoopers on the planet).
Truly elite outliers aside, the male vs. female advantage in sport is not only visibly real but now also documented by professional websites. The internet resource boysvwomen.com is devoted entirely to comparing the athletic performances of the best male high-school athletes in the U.S.A. with those of female Olympians from around the world. The result? The lads win more than 90 percent of the time.
Let’s take the 100-meter dash, seen by many as the classic footrace. Here, the fastest under-18 boy to compete at a recent running of the NBNO youth track meet finished at 10.44 seconds, while the female gold medalist at the last Olympics put up a (still very respectable) 10.71. In the longer 200-meter dash, the equivalent times were 20.71 seconds for the young man and 21.78 for the female world champion. In the 800 meters, my old high-school race, they were 1.49:36 and 1.55:28. In swimming’s (!) key “100 meter free” event, they were 50.09s and 52.70s, respectively. And so on (although East African and European female athletes did chalk up a few wins in truly long-distance races like the 5,000 meters).
At least on some intuitive level, these sorts of human differences are almost universally understood to exist.
The reality of the Caitlin Clark story — she will in fact be a multi-multi-millionaire, her base salary is low entirely because her league makes no money, and that is the case because citizens watch male athletes compete more than they watch female athletes — ties into a deeper theme. Most performance gaps between people or groups that are glibly attributed to racism or sexism (or to genetics alone) largely vanish once literally anything else is adjusted for. Although they were careful to make this point subtly, the skilled business analysts at PayScale recently pointed out that the overall “gender pay gap” between men and women — which currently sits at 83 female cents to one male dollar — closes to exactly one cent when basic adjustments are made for “occupation, experience, education, and other compensable factors.”
The same, as it happens, is true in the context of race. As I point out in my book Taboo, citing the labor economist June O’Neill, a gap in annual income between white males and black males shrinks to — again — about one percentage point when we take into account age and experience, the region where people reside, and aptitude test scores. Furthermore, this has been the case for at least 30 years: O’Neill first obtained her well-known result back in 1990, before doing so again in 2005.
In reality, Caitlin Clark ($78,000/$60,000,000) is in fact making a bit more than NBA No. 1 pick Victor “Wemby” Wembanyama ($12.1M/$10B) as a percentage of actual league revenues — 1/769th of her league’s earnings vs. 1/826th of his. This should surprise no one. Always be multivariate, and always dig until you get to reality.