Stop Shitting on Women’s Sports

This past week, Denver Nuggets player Michael Porter Jr. said of WNBA players and salaries:

“I know these females want to get paid more and they’re very talented, but so is a famous ping pong player… So as much as I understand females wanting the same treatment as men basketball players, it’s a different sport. They’re not packing out the arenas.”

“I would watch… if they lowered the rims and were dunking.”

I fell in love with the game of basketball at a young age. I was lucky to grow up in a family where my dad and my grandfather loved the game too. The first thing that went into any house we lived in was the basketball hoop. Every Sunday we’d go to dinner at my grandparents house, and after dinner we’d go out on the driveway and shoot baskets until it was too dark to see.

I learned early on that people, especially boys/men, had very little respect for women’s sports. In elementary school, I was the only girl playing basketball with the boys at recess. They never passed me the ball (except one time, and I scored). At 33 years old I am still having conversations with men who laugh at the notion that women’s sports are interesting.

And it pisses me off.

It doesn’t just piss me off because I’m a woman. It pisses me off because most of what I hear is categorically untrue. And when I heard what Porter said, my frustration boiled over into a blog post.

I want this to be something you can send to anyone who shits on women’s sports as an “actually, you’re fucking wrong. Read this.”

Since it’s too much to put every argument for all women’s sports in this one post, I’m going to start with the WNBA.

“Women athletes shouldn’t be paid the same as men.”

First of all, the vast majority of female athletes are not asking to be paid the same as their male counterparts.

Let me repeat that: Most female athletes are not asking to be paid the same as their male counterparts.

What they are asking for is for pay equity in the form of revenue share. Let me explain.

First you need to know about something called the CBA: the Collective Bargaining Agreement. It’s a legal contract between the players and the WNBA that spells out things like salaries, player benefits, work conditions, etc. The NBA has one too.

The NBA’s CBA has a 50/50 split between league revenue and player revenue, meaning that 50% of the revenue that the overall league pulls in goes to the players. When I say revenue, I mean things like TV broadcast rights, ticket sales, sponsorship deals, merch sales, digital media revenue, etc. These are all ways that the NBA as a league generates revenue, and the agreement that they have with the players association is that 50% of all of that revenue gets divied up amongst the players (the actual divying is a bit complex, but for our purposes this is the gist).

TLDR: the NBA has an agreement with its players that the league and the players split league revenue 50/50.

Now, let’s look at what the CBA is for the WNBA. In the WNBA, the players and the league only split incremental revenue 50/50. Incremental revenue is calculated by taking the difference between the current year’s revenue and the target revenue.

So if this year’s target revenue was $100m, and the current year’s revenue is $200m, then incremental revenue would be $100m, and players would get $50m of that.

Whereas for the NBA, if this year’s current revenue was $200m (the same amount) the players would get $100m of that.

So why are the CBA’s different?

The WNBA’s revenue sharing agreement is growth-focused. This means that players share in the financial success of the league when it experiences growth beyond a certain target. This approach incentivizes both the league and players to work together to grow revenue, as the players’ share is tied to the league’s ability to increase its earnings.

The argument for the difference is: The NBA is a much larger and more established league than the WNBA in terms of revenue (the NBA’s revenue is multiple billions vs the WNBA’s tens of millions). The argument goes that using an incremental revenue-sharing model allows the WNBA to share a portion of its revenue growth without overburdening the league financially.

However, times have changed folks. Growth is happening. And it’s time for the CBA to reflect that.

Comparing the WNBA to the NBA today isn’t the right comparison.

The NBA is 50 years older than the WNBA, so it’s not exactly a fair comparison to look at them side-by-side today.

A better comparison is to look at where both leagues stood 30-years in, about the age of the WNBA today. If you look at things this way, the WNBA is — relatively speaking — doing quite well, even relative to the NBA.

During the NBA’s third decade, back in the early 70s, average attendance (like the WNBA today) was less than 8,000 per game. The NBA also wasn’t a popular television draw. In fact, the 1970 NBA Finals was the first time in league history that all of the games in the championship series were broadcast nationally.

The WNBA’s revenues have nearly doubled over the last four years, but the players’ share of that money has fallen during that span.

The WNBA’s revenue grew ~233% in 2023, from $60m in 2022 to $200m in 2023. By comparison the NBA’s revenue grew just 0.10% during the same period.

But looking at player’s share of the revenue, the WNBA’s player share went down 9.3% from 2022 to 2019.

WNBA’s salary cap has also grown at a much slower rate, affecting how much players can be paid, and thus and how much talented players are drawn to the league. The NBA’s salary cap by comparison has grown twice as fast, 6.2% on average from 2021–2023 compared to the WNBA’s 3.7%.

Women’s basketball numbers are exploding in almost every category

TV Viewership:

• Viewership for last season’s WNBA finals was up 36% from the previous year, with the championship game as the most-watched Game 4 in finals history.
• The year before that, viewership for the 2022 WNBA playoffs was up 22% over 2021
• In 2023 the women’s NCAA championship game was broadcast on ABC and ESPN2. It was the first time the championship game had ever been broadcast on network TV. As a result, 10.94 million people tuned in, more than double the previous year. That’s more viewers than the 2022 men’s semi-final between Kansas and Villanova.
• Just last week, the Iowa-Maryland women’s NCAA basketball game averaged 1.58 million viewers in prime time to become the most-watched women’s college basketball game on any network since 2010 (thank you Caitlin Clark).
• The Aces’ championship-clinching win peaked at 1.3 million viewers. The entire 2023 WNBA Finals Presented by YouTube TV on ESPN platforms had averaged 728,000 viewers, making it the most-watched WNBA Finals in 20 years, and up 36% from 2022
• Combined viewership for the WNBA across ESPN Networks (ABC, ESPN, ESPN2) and the CBS Television Network was up 21% over the 2022 regular season
• The 2023 WNBA Regular Season reached over 36 million total unique viewers across all national networks, the highest since 2008 and up 27% from 2022.

Attendance:

• WNBA attendance was up 16% for the 2023 season compared to last year. The average attendance of 6,615 fans per game was the highest since 2018.
• The WNBA had its highest total attendance in 13 years (1,587,488) last year
• The 2022 WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces saw the highest increase in average attendance, (more than 66% year over year), averaging a league-high 9,551 fans per game. The Aces also hosted the highest-attended game this season, drawing a crowd of 17,406 against the Phoenix Mercury on Sept. 10 on the final day of the regular season.

Merch

• The league has seen a surge in merchandise sales this season. Overall sales of WNBA merchandise at the NBA Store in New York are up 78% this season compared to the same time last year. In addition, sales of merchandise at Dick’s Sporting Goods are up 68% compared to the same time last season.

Social Media

• Across all WNBA social media handles, the league generated a record 373 million video views in 2023, up 96% from the 2022 season

Why women’s sports is a great investment

Yes, I do work at a venture capital fund, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t evaluate this from an investment standpoint. And my take is: Women’s sports is a great bet to make.

Why? The growth potential.

If you look at pure numbers as they stand today, the NBA dwarfs the WNBA in most categories. This is in large part because 1) the league has been around for 5 decades longer, 2) the games are far easier to access and watch, and 3) player compensation is so high that the NBA has no trouble attracting top players.

But if you look at the growth of the leagues in every category, the WNBA is heating up in a way that the NBA isn’t. Once you’re already huge, growth slows, right? The WNBA’s potential for growth is what makes it so exciting as an investment. And that goes for almost all women’s sports (we haven’t even talked about women’s soccer… that deserves its own post). Team valuations are climbing. Recently the Seattle Storm sold a 14% stake in the team at a $151m valuation — more than 10x the prior record for a WNBA team.

Put another way: NBA franchises aren’t going to grow 10-fold over the next five years, or 50. Women’s sports are already doing it.

Ok look, of course I’m passionate about this. Women’s sports is about so much more than games to me. It stands for something. It represents the strength, capability and power of women in a world dominated by men.

Representation matters. It’s a big deal for young girls to be able to watch Kelsey Plum, Breanna Stewart, A’Ja Wilson, Britney Griner and Caitlin Clark. Just like it was a big deal for me as a kid to watch Sheryl Swoops, Cynthia Cooper, Lisa Leslie and Candace Parker. It’s also a big deal for young girls to see us as a society value women’s sports. It’s akin to valuing women, in my opinion.

p.s. — I want to give a shoutout to my alma mater, UCONN, whose dominance in women’s basketball has turned the entire state of Connecticut into fans. When I was at school, my classmates would turn out for the men’s basketball games, but the entire state would turn out for the women.