Someone tagged me in a post this week about Jackie Young.
Jackie is from Princeton, Indiana, just forty five minutes from where I live. And, so exciting, she just became the first WNBA player in history to sign a million dollar contract. The first, EVER, in 2026.
And when people in the comments started debating about why it took this long, the “reasonable” answers came flooding in. The WNBA was mismanaged. They didn’t have the viewership. They didn’t have the sponsors….
Those answers are all technically true and completely dishonest at the same time.
Here is what is also true.
Moses Malone became the first NBA player to earn a million dollars in a season back in 1979. Jackie Young did it in 2026. That is a 46 year gap between what men were paid and what women were paid to play the same sport.
In 1965, Wilt Chamberlain became the first NBA player to earn $100,000 in a season. The highest paid WNBA player in all of 2025 made $269,000. Men crossed the $100,000 threshold sixty years ago, and last year the best women in the league were still making less than three times that.
Stephen Curry made $59 million last season. The new WNBA supermax, which players are celebrating right now as a historic breakthrough, is $1.4 million. That means the best paid woman in the WNBA will make what Stephen Curry makes in about eleven days.
So yes, there was a “business problem.”
Of course, it is not just basketball.
The US Women’s Soccer Team won the 2015 FIFA World Cup. They collectively received $6 million less than the US Men’s Soccer Team, which had lost in the round of 16. The women eventually won a $24 million settlement after years of lawsuits and public fighting, just to be compensated at a fraction of what men who performed worse had been paid.
And when Megan Rapinoe and her teammates spoke publicly about the inequality, conservative media called them “unpatriotic losers” and “activist prima donnas.” When the US lost in the 2023 World Cup, people celebrated openly. Actual Americans cheered for the United States to lose because the women on the team had the audacity to demand equal pay. Rapinoe said it plainly, “There’s no way for us to win, and there’s no way for us to lose.” Win and you’re too arrogant. Lose and you deserve it.
That is what happens when women ask to be paid fairly for their work.
In rugby, the women’s league team salary cap for an entire squad right now is $240,000, split between 45 to 50 players. Many of the best women’s rugby players in the world work full time as doctors, nurses, and teachers and train at night. Meanwhile a single male rugby player in the same country can earn $900,000 a year.
Ilona Maher is a US Olympic medalist. She won bronze at the Paris Olympics. She has 5 million Instagram followers and is one of the most visible athletes in women’s rugby in the world. She has said publicly that she makes more money from TikTok than from playing the sport she has dedicated her life to. Not because she is a content creator who plays rugby on the side. Because she is an elite athlete who had to become a content creator to survive.
In Wimbledon, the oldest tennis tournament in history, women were not paid equally until 2007. In golf, as recently as 2016, the top 100 male golfers collectively won $242 million in prize money. The top 100 women won $49 million.
The pattern is the same in every sport and on every continent. Women win. Women prove the audience is there. Women prove the revenue is there. And then women have to sue, strike, boycott, testify before Congress, and be called unpatriotic just to be compensated at a fraction of what men receive.
And then people say, “well, there just wasn’t enough viewership.”
Here is what the research actually shows.
A 30 year study found that in 2019, 95% of all television sports coverage focused on men’s sports. Because someone in every production meeting at every network decided that men’s sports were the story worth telling.
And the coverage that did exist, until recently? Researchers described it as “gender-bland sexism.” A deliberate flatness in the voice. No excitement, no color, no urgency. Men’s sports got drama and energy and storytelling. Women’s sports got a bored recitation of scores between the “real” content.
I know this because I lived it.
I grew up in Savannah, Georgia. I went to St. Vincent’s Academy, the all girls Catholic school in the heart of historic downtown Savannah. I was not an athlete at the time. I was an enthusiastic member of the pep club cheering, quite loudly, from the sidelines. School spirit was never anything I lacked. LOL
Around 1990 or 1991, our basketball team won the Savannah city championship. I was in that gym with one of those large VHS camcorders, and it was a nail biter. The kind of game you talk about for years. We were HYPE.
I went home and turned on the 11 o’clock news to watch my team get their moment. There was nothingggggggggg. No footage, no celebration, no mention and just and a lame listing on the scores recount. But the boys’ basketball team sure was covered. They had a so so game. With fancy footage.
I was so angry that I called WSAV at 11:30 pm at night from my neon ROTARY phone and asked why.
The person who answered told me that the news crew had been at the girls’ game, but had left early to go cover the end of the boys’ game. By the time they got back to the station, there was no time left for the girls.
Ahem. The crew was there and they watched those girls play. They chose, in real time, to walk out of a championship game to go cover the boys instead. The girls won a city title in front of a packed gym, and the decision was made that the boys’ story was worth staying for and the girls’ story was not.
The audience existed because I was in it. The fans were there. The girls performed at the highest level. And the camera still left.
That is not a business problem. That is a choice. And it is a choice that was made over and over again, in every city, at every level, for decades. And then, after thirty years of making that choice, people looked at women’s sports and say, “see, not enough viewership.”
I saw the same logic operating everywhere I looked at that school.
Our gym was in a beautiful historic building on Abercorn Street, which, like many beautiful historic buildings, had a gym that raised some questions you did not ask out loud. (Is that asbestos?)
Our brother school was Benedictine Military School, the all boys Catholic school across town. Benedictine recently completed a $23 million capital campaign, exceeding their 12 million dollar goal. New stadium. New football field. Sports plaza. For a high school.
I am not saying the people who donated to that campaign shouldn’t. I am saying that this is exactly how the system works and has always worked. Money flows toward boys’ sports. It has always flowed toward boys’ sports. And girls learn young, in every gym and every field, that their games are not worth that kind of investment.
The nuns who lived at St. Vincent’s shared a minivan. The bishop drove a BMW that had been donated to him.
Did you know that nuns take a vow of poverty? They give up the right to own anything, including property, inheritance, and personal income. Diocesan priests and bishops are not required to take that vow. They can own property, receive gifts, and accumulate wealth.
The Church frames the nuns’ vow as spiritual liberation. And I believe the women who take those vows experience it that way. But I also want you to ask yourself why, in the structure of the Catholic Church, are the women required to own nothing while the men at the top are not?
When women in medieval Europe entered religious life, the vow of poverty ensured they could not own land. In a society where land meant power and political influence, the vow of poverty for women was also a guarantee that women in the Church would remain structurally dependent. Women who could not own property could not accumulate power. The institution was designed to keep it that way.
I noticed the minivan and the BMW as a teenager and I have never stopped thinking about it. Because it is the same logic, operating across every institution. Resources flow toward men. Women’s labor, women’s contribution, women’s achievement is treated as worth less. Women should be grateful for what they have and not ask for more.
That logic does not stay in the church. It goes to the gym. It goes to the stadium and the TV contract and the production meeting where someone decides to leave a girls’ championship game early.
It is all the same agreement.
What we are watching right now, with Jackie Young and Ilona Maher and Megan Rapinoe and Caitlin Clark and Serena Williams and every woman who has ever been underpaid, under covered, or called unpatriotic for demanding fairness, is what happens when undeniable talent refuses to be invisible.
Serena Williams is the greatest tennis player who ever lived. That is not an opinion. Ilona Maher won an Olympic medal and worked two jobs to do it. Jackie Young has three championships and two gold medals and made $200,000 last year. These are women of once-in-a-generation talent who have had to fight for every dollar, every camera, every contract, every scrap of institutional support that their male counterparts were handed as a starting point.
The men had $23 million sports complexes. The women had minivans.
The men had sixty years of NBA salary escalation, network deals, highlight shows, and cultural legitimacy built into the infrastructure of American life. The women had to go to Congress to ask to be paid fairly, and got called unpatriotic for it.
And they did it anyway.
The low viewership, low sponsorship, low salaries are not the cause of the inequality.
They are the result of it.
And now you know.