On Saturday, on my way home from grocery shopping, I heard this story on NPR’s Weekend Edition. (For the record, I, a fairly staunch conservative, really enjoy NPR, and I have for years. If one has the mental capacity to sift through NPR’s political bias — and I believe I do — one can hear a great range of news and human interest stories, told in-depth, intelligently, with a high degree of journalistic excellence.) The story is about Wimbeldon offering the same winnings purse for its women tennis players as for its men, for the first time this year.
I think King is along the right track, sort of. But not quite.
Now, I’m totally not a feminist. I’m just not. However, I do believe — strongly — in equal pay for equal work. But in sports, this can get tricky. The NBA, for example, brings in boatloads more $$ than its women’s counterpart, the WNBA. I think, though, I have come up with a solution:
How about restructuring athletes’ pay so that it is commensurate with the profits from any given franchise? I think that Major League Baseball does this, to some extent, but why not make it across the board? IOW, Wimbeldon could evaluate, say, the average profits taken in the last 5 years from ticket sales, advertising income, and any other source of monetary gain, breaking it down both for the men and the women. Then (just pulling these numbers out of the air), say the winnings for first place is $1,000,000, and that equals 6% of the profits, make the women’s top pay 6% of the profits that the women’s end of it takes in. If that makes it equal to the men’s, great! If that makes it MORE than the men’s, then they deserve it. If that makes it less than the men’s… well, sports is a business, and it’s only fair to make the pay in line with what the profits can support.
Make sense?
Same for WNBA. If the NBA’s top star’s salary is $3M/year, and that equals 0.5% of the year’s net (ha, ha — pun not intended), make the top WNBA star’s salary equal to 0.5% of the profit.
And so on.
