SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE.

As baseball season began, the women of the fevered brow had basketball seasons to fret about.  "College basketball season is winding down, with Buffalo of the Mid-American winning the ladies' version of the NIT, in their own gym.  In a few months the griping season of the WNBA will be upon us."  A Buffalo assistant coach will now be coaching at Northern Illinois, which drew more fans to a regular season game in 1990 than Buffalo did winning that tournament in their own building.

Since then, that team has trashed its value proposition, which might be what the ladies professional basketball leagues continually do, and for the same toxic incantations of identity politics and social protest.  Which continued, predictably, at the recent all-star game (and why in the name of all that is holy is there a basketball all-star game in July) with the players calling attention to ongoing salary negotiations.

The culture war stuff predictably followed.

The WNBA loses $50 million every year and has NEVER generated a profit. You deserve $0.00. pic.twitter.com/fWWxU0pSt1

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 20, 2025

Twitchy's Warren Squire continued the pile-on.  "Yep, the WNBA is pretty much a charity case kept afloat by the NBA. Posters couldn’t help but notice the correlation between the WNBA players and the recently canceled ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.’"  With all the troubles Amtrak have been having even running trains over the past few weeks, we never lack for money-suck material, do we?

Yahoo Sports senior writer Jeff Eisenberg thought the salary dispute was material an economist might have something to say about, and he found a good one serving as consultant to the union.

The distance between the union and the league is vast enough that it raises the question: Who’s right? Are WNBA players as grossly underpaid as they claim? Or are they asking for too much given the WNBA’s history of unprofitability and the potential fragility of its recent rapid surge in popularity?

For the past year, Harvard economics professor and 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin has been advising the WNBPA in collective bargaining. Last month, Goldin penned a guest essay in the New York Times entitled “How Underpaid Are WNBA Players? It’s Embarrassing.”

After examining TV ratings, attendance data and other metrics, Goldin estimated that the average WNBA salary should be “roughly one-quarter to one-third of the average NBA salary to achieve pay equity.” In reality, WNBA salaries currently range from the league minimum of $66,079 to a maximum of $249,244. That’s not in the same stratosphere as the NBA, where the league minimum is $1.27 million and the highest-paid superstars will earn more than $50 million apiece next season.

“How could that be?” wrote Goldin. “The most likely explanation is that the WNBA is not receiving the full value it contributes to the combined NBA and WNBA enterprise revenue.”

Ah, the old problem of common and joint costs.  Here's how the professor develops her explanation.

Yet players in the W.N.B.A. make far less money than many male athletes in less popular sports leagues — and only a sliver of what the average N.B.A. player does. Nothing can justify this extraordinary pay gap.

As a labor economist and an economic historian, I study the world of work, and much of my research has focused on gender pay gaps. Working women in the United States today earn 84 cents for every dollar a man earns, government data shows. My job is to question such data, to make certain that we are comparing apples to apples and then to try to understand why there are differences.

Across the American economy, much of the gender pay gap no longer reflects outright discrimination. It instead reflects the different occupations and industries that men and women choose to enter, as well as other factors. But gender discrimination remains a major problem, and there is now a prominent example for everyone to see: professional basketball.

For the past year, I have worked with the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, the union for W.N.B.A. players, to consider the earnings of basketball players, and I have been surprised by what I found. The average N.B.A. player’s salary is around $10 million in the current season. That is 80 times what the average W.N.B.A. player earned (about $127,000 in salary) in the 2024 season.

If you're writing for The Quarterly Journal of Economics, your article includes language like "There is a difference between average hourly earnings of men and those of women that remains after the partial effects of experience, risk, and education have been identified."  If you're serving as consultant to the players' union and writing for New York's Times, you can assert that "Nothing can justify this extraordinary pay gap."  Dear reader, summarize in one sentence the distinction between doing positive economics and being a hired gun.  In that Quarterly Journal of Economics article, you suggest that some of the residual difference might be biases showing.  Professor Goldin knows how to do that work. "In a 2010 study, Ms. Goldin and Mr. Katz pointed out that women often receive a wage penalty for demanding a job that’s flexible enough for the woman to be the 'on-call' parent. Men are more apt to receive a wage premium for being willing to be the 'on-call' employee."

Now, it might be that she got the conclusion right.

Three other sports economists who spoke to Yahoo Sports agreed with Goldin’s assessment that WNBA players are not being paid what they deserve. As evidence, they pointed to the fact that about 50% of the NBA’s revenue goes to player salaries and that WNBA players take home a minuscule percentage of their league’s revenue by comparison.

“Even without knowing the exact revenues of the WNBA, we know they’re certainly not making even close to 50%,” University of San Francisco professor of sports management Nola Agha told Yahoo Sports. “So they’re absolutely underpaid.”

The WNBA will make at least $500 million in revenue next year, argues David Berri, an economics professor at Southern Utah and the co-author of “Slaying the Trolls: Why the Trolls are Very, Very Wrong About Women and Sports.”  Berri bases that estimate on a report from Forbes that places the league’s 2024 revenue at $226 million, another report from Sportico that the expansion Golden State Valkyries are bringing in $75 million in their inaugural season and the WNBA’s media rights deal with Disney that will provide $200 million annually.

Converting those media rights payments and ticket revenues and jersey sales into salaries is not easy, particularly with a sports conglomerate, with one of the enterprises playing a longer season than the other.  Professor Goldin attempts to create a like-with-like comparison none-the-less.

A key fact is that the N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. resemble a joint venture in which the league’s individual finances are not transparent to the public. The N.B.A. owns around half of the W.N.B.A. and helps apportion money between the two leagues. Last year the N.B.A. negotiated joint television contracts for the leagues, in which Disney, NBC and Amazon Prime Video agreed to pay the two leagues roughly $77 billion for the right to show their games over 11 years. The gap in player salaries appears to reflect the highly unequal way that N.B.A. owners divide the leagues’ revenue.

Some simple math can help highlight what an economically reasonable gap between N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. salaries might be. The most important factor is viewers’ attention — eyeballs on the screen — which broadcasters monetize by selling advertisements or streaming subscriptions. This revenue allows them to pay the leagues for the right to broadcast games.

The average W.N.B.A. game recently drew about 77 percent of the eyeballs for the average N.B.A. game. The gap in total eyeballs per player is much larger because the N.B.A. has more games per season and longer games. Taking into account all of these differences shows that the W.N.B.A. attracts about 30 percent, or roughly one-third, as many eyeballs per player as the N.B.A. does. This ratio is a reasonable estimate of the actual relationship between W.N.B.A. and N.B.A. broadcast revenue per player — and, by extension, what W.N.B.A. players should receive in salary relative to N.B.A. players.

Broadcast revenue is not the only way that the leagues make money. But it is the primary one. And other sources of revenue point to a broadly similar gap between the leagues. In 2024, for example, the W.N.B.A.’s total attendance was about one-tenth as large as the N.B.A.’s attendance. Adjusting for the fewer teams in the W.N.B.A. shows that it attracts about one-quarter of the attendance per player in the N.B.A. All these numbers suggest that the average W.N.B.A. salary should be roughly one-quarter to one-third of the average N.B.A. salary to achieve pay equity.

Instead, the average W.N.B.A. salary is but a minuscule fraction — a mere 1/80th — of the average N.B.A. salary. How could that be? The most likely explanation is that the W.N.B.A. is not receiving the full value it contributes to the combined N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. enterprise revenue.

That "by extension" is doing a lot of work there, and having somebody with a good jive detector on the job is useful during negotiations.

Back in 2018, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said that the WNBA annually loses roughly $10 million per year. Those losses allegedly quadrupled last year, sources told the New York Post, citing a rise in expenses like full-time charter flights and the fact that the WNBA’s new media rights deal would not kick in for another two years.

Count Andrew Zimbalist among those skeptical of those figures. Zimbalist, a professor at Smith College and a leading sports economist, served as an advisor to the NBA Players Association during multiple previous collective bargaining sessions. He remembers the NBA claiming losses each time in an effort to gain public support and extract further concessions from the players.

“They might claim they’re making a loss but when you look closely at their books they’re not really making a loss,” Zimbalist told Yahoo Sports.

“There are lots of shenanigans they can use to play with the books, so one would have to look very carefully at how they’re doing their accounting before you even enter into discussions. The women’s union needs to have some financially adept people at the bargaining table so the owners can’t pull the wool over their eyes.”

The lack of transparency regarding the WNBA’s finances is a huge issue, according to union president Nneka Ogwumike of the Seattle Storm.

True though all his assertions are, let us note that Mr Eisenberg's roster of academic economists includes two consultants to the players' unions and two professors whose priors, based on the works he cites, might be tight.  There's not much by way of dissenting perspectives out there: a Sports Economist essay by Adam Batansky from late 2024 covers much of the same ground.  Whether there is a way for the professional basketball joint venture to find more payroll in the budget or whether it's on the women to offer a better value proposition remains as an exercise.