WNBA Loses $40 Million Despite Woke Mass Marketing Campaign
Every year feminist activists attempt to stir up a new controversy in order to fabricate public outrage and keep their agenda visible on social media. In 2024 one such controversy was the supposed pay disparity (which they call the "gender pay gap") between women's professional basketball and men's professional basketball.
The notion of the gender pay gap has been thoroughly debunked in the western world. The original theory was rooted solely on the average pay accrued by all men vs all women and was a statistical misrepresentation of reality. When those numbers are broken down, the fact is that men work longer hours, they work more difficult jobs, more skilled jobs, they take less vacation time and they don't have babies so they don't need paternity leave. All of these factors and more add up to a higher average salary for men vs women.
It has everything to do with women's choices and nothing to do with some nefarious patriarchal conspiracy to hold them back from success.
Because the overall gender pay gap argument has been destroyed and is no longer taken seriously, feminists then tried to search for specific examples of pay disparity in gender segregated professions. Professional sports is one of the few venues in which feminists could present a male vs female one-to-one comparison and say there is a distinct lack of fairness. Except, that argument assumes that male athletes and female athletes perform at the same level. The fact is, they do not.
Women's game performance and abilities are far behind those of their professional male counterparts. They are two separate universes in terms of entertainment. This is an issue which no one in the mainstream wants to address - The women's games are mostly terrible to watch.
Claims that the WNBA is "skyrocketing" in popularity are greatly exaggerated and the fact of the matter is the league has never been profitable. Recent reports indicate that the WNBA lost over $40 million this season and now investors are growing impatient.
“The WNBA owes the NBA so much we won’t see any windfall for years,” an NBA team executive told The New York Post.
The reality that undermines the pay gap theory for women's basketball is simple: The ladies don't sell enough tickets. Nor do they sell any merchandise, video games, jerseys, banners or much else for that matter. Their huge loss this year is concrete proof of that. The WNBA only exists because it is subsidized by the NBA and some private (and mostly male) investors; they take money from the male league in order to fund their games, and they have been losing that money consistently for over 25 years.
Comedian Bill Burr explains the insanity of the WNBA and feminism best:
The low sales argument once again debunked feminist claims of unfair salary practices. The WNBA makes no money; they lose money. So, the players should be happy they have jobs and get paid at all. But feminists weren't done yet - They then argued that the WNBA sells less tickets and and less merchandise, not because the women's game is mediocre, but because the WNBA "doesn't get the same level of promotion as the men."
They claim that if the WNBA was advertised at the same level, they would bring in the same kind of revenues as the NBA. Corporate partners with the WNBA then began pushing the league in a number of ads. Google took the lead in this endeavor in an effort to hype up women's basketball.
Obviously the campaign didn't work and marketing makes little difference. The only real drive of new interest in the WNBA has been Caitlin Clark, a draft pick that actually knows how to play and just happens to be white. This has led to drama, with other non-white players attacking Clark on and off the court out of jealousy. As Bill Burr notes, women prefer to tear each other down instead of building each other up, and that's one of the reasons why they fail in organized group endeavors.
The latest profit reports should lay to rest any future arguments from the woke crowd over pay for female athletes. They have no more excuses left. It's not the patriarchy, it's not lack of marketing, it's not lack of investment - It's lack of public interest in the WNBA on every level.