Fair pay and athletics: The gender disparities continue to loom

This post is part of an initiative by the National Women’s Law Center in honor of Equal Pay Day — “voices are rising up across the web in support of fair pay for women.” All day, they’ll be promoting blog posts about fair pay and tweets with the hashtag #fairpay.

The reason today is Equal Pay Day: April 28, 2009 marks the day when the average woman’s wages will finally catch up with those paid to the average man in 2008 (note – that was last year). Here’s where you can find state-by-state data on the wage gap.

So what can you to help? Well, if you’re a blogger, register here and blog about it. If you’re not (or you don’t want to), then urge your Senators to support the Paycheck Fairness Act.

In keeping with my theme, I wanted to share some interesting information about fair pay in athletics. Some may think that these days, women get paid “very similar” or even “close to” men. But that’s hardly the case, as you can see…

My proof: A Web page with statistics on gender inequality and fair pay and sports – collected by the Women’s Sports Foundation (I wish these were a little bit more up-to-date, but I doubt WSF can afford to do that):

College Sports

• Although the gap has narrowed, male athletes still receive 55% of college athletic scholarship dollars, leaving only 45% to be allocated to women.
• Women’s teams receive only 38% of college sport operating dollars and 33% of college athletic team recruitment spending.
• Women coach 43% of women’s teams and only 2% of men’s team’s and comprise 19% of athletic directors at NCAA institutions.
• In the NCAA’s Division I, the richest and most powerful athletic programs, women hold less than 8% of athletic director positions. There are more female college presidents of Division I-A schools than there are female athletic directors.
• In NCAA Division I-A, head coaches for women’s teams receive an average salary of $850,400 while head coaches for men’s teams average $1,783,100. This is a difference of $932,700.

Professional Sports

• Despite the French Open’s announcement this year to offer equal prize money to both male and female champions, other female French Open competitors will still be paid considerably less than their male counterparts.
• While ESPN is commended for tripling the women’s purse for Summer X 12, purses are still not equal and women competitors are significantly underrepresented in both the Summer and Winter X Games, making up only 931% of the total athletes in the Winter 2007 X Games and only 9% of the Summer 2006 X Games.
• Total prize money for the PGA tour, $256 million, is more than five times that of the LPGA tour, $50 million. Similar discrepancies exist throughout professional sports.
• For a WNBA player in the 2005 season, the minimum salary was $31,200, the maximum salary was $89,000, and the team salary cap was $673,000. For NBA players in the 2004-2005 season, the minimum salary was $385,277, the maximum salary was $15.355 million, and the team salary cap was $46 million.
• For finishing in third place in the 2003 Women’s World Cup, each U.S. women’s national soccer team member was awarded $25,000. They would have received $58,000 if they had won the Cup. For reaching the quarterfinal of the World Cup in 2002, the U.S. men’s national soccer team members received $200,000 each.
• In 2000, the average salary for vice presidents at sports corporate sponsors was 70% higher for men than for women ($141,250 vs. $83,067). The industry’s overall average base salary for women was $58,407 vs. $88,796 for men. In 2002 the overall sponsorship industry, which includes sports sponsorship, still showed a large disparity between male and female salaries. Take-home pay for males averaged $108,350 versus $71,123 for females, a 52% differential. Also, 32% of men earned a commission, compared with 12% of women.

Highly recommend you continue to follow the blog posts on this topic of fair pay – very interesting.