Working women earn 80% as much as their male counterparts, which is almost .81cents for every dollar men earn. But when it comes to professional athletes that number falls a lot lower.
Take the U.S. women’s national soccer team, which generates more revenue than the men’s squad and has taken home the World Cup three more times than the men’s league—which has taken home ZERO—yet in 2016 the women’s soccer team filed a wage-discrimination complaint against U.S. Soccer for being paid one-quarter of what the men make. For the first time since 2012 women have been shut out of Forbes annual ‘World’s Highest Paid Athletes’ list. Tennis has long been the only way women get on this list,but Serena Williams fell $5 million short of the $23 million cutoff.
In basketball, the WNBA’s TV deal with ESPN is worth $25 million per year, while the NBA earns $2.5 billion, or 100 times as much. The lack of visibility on TV means less endorsement deals. But times they are a-changing. The World Surf League announced this month that, beginning in 2019 season, every WSL event will award equal prize money for male and female athletes. This historic announcement marks the World Surf League as the first and only US-based global sports league to offer equal prize money.
Here with me to discuss the gender pay gap in sports is 6-time world surfing champion, Steph Gilmore, the first female CEO of the World Surfing League, Sophie Goldschmidt, and International Female Super Bantamweight World Boxing Council Champion, Heather ‘Heat’ Hardy.