Uneven Playing Field: The Gender Wage Gap in Sports

In Jan. 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Cantwell-Capito Act into law, guaranteeing equal pay for women on Team USA ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics. It was hailed as a landmark victory and a turning point for gendered wage disparities among athletes. But progress in one area does not reflect the whole picture: for instance, at the professional level, Women’s National Basketball Association players still earn a fraction of NBA salaries, and female collegiate programs continue to receive less funding and fewer resources at nearly every level. One piece of legislation cannot fix what decades of systematic inequality have created.

The gender pay gap in sports is widely recognized, yet its scale remains striking. For the third year in a row, not a single female athlete appeared on the list of the world’s 100 highest-paid athletes, determined by total earnings inclusive of salary and endorsements. A’ja Wilson (Las Vegas Aces) holds the richest contract in WNBA history for her 2026 season, starting at $1.4 million annually, while Stephan Curry, the highest-paid NBA player for the 26-27 season, earns a base salary of $59.6 million. The gap does not remain confined to the top; Caitlin Clark, who transformed women’s basketball by shattering scoring records and filling arenas, signed a four-year rookie contract worth just $338,056, a fraction of the $55.1 million contract signed by Victor Wembanyama, the NBA’s top draft pick the year prior. The gap is even starker when measured against those who barely played: Ben Simmons, who appeared in just 90 games over three seasons with the Brooklyn Nets, was paid $123.8 million, roughly 367 times what Clark earned across her entire rookie contract. 

The most common defense of this disparity is a market one: women’s sports leagues generate less profit, so women are consequently paid less. It is a one-dimensional argument, and an increasingly dishonest one. The WNBA generated an estimated $300 million in revenue in 2025. The NBA, by comparison, projected over $14 billion that same season. Yes, that gap is real. But it does not come close to explaining the disparity in pay. The market argument obscures a more fundamental problem: it is not just that women’s leagues earn less, but that their athletes receive a far smaller share of what their leagues do earn. WNBA players take home roughly 10% of league revenue in salaries, while NBA players receive around 50% through their collective bargaining agreement. This gap is not a product of scale, but rather one of structure that exists independent of how much profit any given league generates.

Nearly a billion viewers tuned into the 2023 Women’s World Cup, and almost 19 million watched the 2024 NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship, making it the most-watched basketball game since 2019 for men’s, women’s, collegiate, or professional sports. These are not the viewership numbers of sports that “nobody watches.” They reflect a thriving, billion-dollar industry whose athletes are somehow paid as if it weren’t.

The soccer world offers perhaps the clearest illustration of this inequality. When the U.S. men’s team was eliminated in the 2014 World Cup, they went home with $8 million. The following year, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team won the entire tournament and earned only $2 million. The USWNT eventually fought back through years of litigation and ultimately settled for $24 million in 2022. That the most decorated women’s soccer program in the world had to sue its own federation just to be taken seriously is a problem far deeper than the $6 million difference in prize money. 

The financial gap was hardly the only insult; the women played on artificial turf while the men played on grass imported from Canada. FIFA could not be bothered to give the women the same playing field, literally. Moreover, days before the Women’s World Cup kicked off, the FIFA website was still promoting the men’s tournament, which began four years later. By 2019, the frustration had spilled onto the field itself; when the USWNT won the World Cup in France, the crowd’s chants shifted from “U-S-A” to “equal pay.” 

None of this happened by accident. Leagues that invest in broadcasting deals, marketing campaigns, and prime-time scheduling build audiences—that is a fact, and how the sports industry has always worked. For decades, women’s leagues have received a fraction of that investment and were then held up as proof that fans simply did not care about women’s sports. But when the infrastructure is finally put into place, the audiences show up. Even before the WNBA’s new media deal fully took effect, the 2025 regular season (the last under the old structure) became the most-watched in league history. If that kind of growth was possible under a deal worth a sixth of its new replacement, the question was never whether fans were interested. It was whether the league was being given a fair chance to reach them. 

This gap does not start in the professional leagues, and oftentimes begins the moment a female athlete steps foot onto a college campus. The NCAA’s own 2021 gender equity review found stark disparities in resources provided to men’s and women’s programs: unequal weight room facilities, fewer meals, smaller travel budgets, and less marketing support, even at the same institution.

Title IX, passed in 1972, prohibits sex-based discrimination in any federally funded education program, including athletics. But compliance has been inconsistently enforced and narrowly interpreted for decades; schools can technically meet Title IX thresholds while simultaneously providing women’s programs with demonstrably inferior facilities, coaching staff, and budgets. 

The women’s game has not been underperforming; it has been underserved. There is a crucial difference between a product that fails on its own merits and one that was deliberately starved of the resources it needed to thrive. For far too long, those in power have been able to blur that distinction for women’s sports. 

The Cantwell-Capito Act was meaningful, and the USWNT’s hard-fought equal-pay settlement was meaningful. But these are narrow victories in a much wider war that has yet to fully begin. Federal legislation cannot mandate that professional leagues restructure their salary caps or force governing bodies to equalize prize money. Most of all, it cannot undo generations of institutional neglect and sexism.

Female athletes have done everything asked of them, and then some. They have broken records, sold out arenas, and created an entire industry worth billions of dollars. These athletes are not asking for a handout or special privilege, but to be paid for the same commitment, sacrifice, and excellence that their male counterparts are rewarded handsomely for. The difference between their paychecks and the men’s is not a market outcome; it is a deliberate choice. At some point, the institutional powers that protect and reinforce this sexism will have to start choosing differently. 

Adin Hootnick ’29 (ahootnick@college.harvard.edu) cares about gender equality in sports and beyond.