WNBA- Rights vs. Reality

Did you know the average ticket prices in the WNBA in 2011 were $15? This is crazy considering that there are tickets in the NBA sold for thousands of dollars. I’m going to be do my You & The World project on Women in basketball. I’m interested in this topic because I am female who plays basketball. I take this sport seriously so I felt like it would be helpful to know how the WNBA and college women basketball players were treated. I learned that there is a huge difference between a NBA and WNBA player, and it’s not just the difference in the gender. In one article I read called “ Top WNBA Salaries vs. NBA Salaries: Who Gets Paid More? “ I learned that Steph Curry made 11.4 million dollars in 2016. Yet, the highest paid WNBA player, Nneka Ogwumike gets paid 95,000 dollars. Steph curry isn’t even the highest paid NBA player and he gets paid over 75% more than Ogwumike. Ogwumike works just as hard as Curry to get to where she’s at right now. There are many wage gaps like this in the WNBA

This is a picture of Nneka Ogwumike from her twitter's profile picture.

This is the problem. Women aren’t treated as equals to men. When young girls see this, they get discouraged. Sometimes as a result of being discouraged, people give up. You might not think this is a big deal but it can become a major problem.The WNBA is small. It only consists of 144 players at maximum. So if there are a bunch of women the WNBA because of the shortage of pay there will be no WNBA. Without a WNBA why would colleges offer scholarships to their women’s basketball teams? Many people use these scholarships to go to school, so that’s a significant amount of women not attending college. A big cause of under pay in the WNBA is the fact that the WNBA doesn’t get enough publicity. The more people watch the WNBA and buy tickets to their games, the more money they make. The WNBA gets their funds from the NBA.

The WNBA’s structure is completely different from the NBA’s as well. There are 349 women’s basketball college teams. This is great but it’s also one big system filled with heartbreaks. There are only 12 teams in the WNBA conference and only 12 players permitted to a team. In the NBA there are 30 teams. There are at least 14 players per team and 491 players in the league total. No wonder why WNBA players aren’t getting paid what they deserve. The WNBA doesn’t have enough publicity because the league is too small.

These are the name of all twelve teams.

I want to change the salaries, team expansion, and amount of publicity the WNBA has. An idea I had was to write a letter to the WNBA and NBA explaining how unfair this is to all the hardworking females that want to play basketball. If they expand the players in the WNBA maybe more people would watch and buy tickets to games. With more people watching, the publicity would go up, along with the money they indorse. Then female basketball players would get paid the equivalent amount to men in the NBA.We need to act on these problems because our actions can determine the next woman’s future.

This is my annotated bibliography.It has most interesting facts I’ve found about this topic.