Some pro athletes wore T-shirts the other day that ticked people off, predictably.
Yeah, this is about the WNBA All-Stars, whose union has begun negotiations with the league on a new CBA. Before the showcase game on Saturday, players went through their pregame routines in matching shirts that read: “Pay us what you owe us.”
And, predictably, on social media and in comment sections and, soon, in emails to me, people paid them insults.
That shirt gets at why I wish this league and everything related to it would go away.
they are obnoxious and unlikeable. No one roots for people like that.
It’s neither the first nor last instance of fans taking the side of owners over players on the issue of compensation – but in this case, it’s not a matter of multi-millionaires demanding many more millions in a way that can, justifiably or not, rub regular working folks wrong.
This is far from that. These are athletes who are making, basically, regular-people money – for example: the Sparks have two players making $202,000 per year and seven making $85,000 or less, much of it non-guaranteed – asking for a raise. This is a group of workers asking to take home a larger percentage of the revenue that their efforts produce.
In the lucrative landscape of pro sports in America, the WNBA players’ request and the reaction to it is like hearing Oliver Twist asking: “Please sir, I want some more …” and having people rally behind the workhouse.
Though to be fair, to be real, these women aren’t begging. One thing about WNBA players – and if you didn’t know, now you know – they don’t play nice.
They’re going to be “fierce and tactical” as they fight “like anyone who’s succeeded in negotiating powerful deals for themselves” has.
That was actress Jennifer Lawrence in her 2015 essay following the Sony Pictures leak that revealed a notable pay disparity between the men and women who starred in the film “American Hustle.” Lawrence wrote about what a commendable job her male co-stars Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper did in negotiating 9% apiece of the movie’s profits.
That was, now famously, more than the 7% Lawrence was paid – after her representatives negotiated up from 5%. Never mind that she was already an Oscar winner, the face of the successful “Hunger Games” franchise and that she was the one among the A-list ensemble who showed up and brought her ‘A’ game to set: “Jennifer Lawrence Saved This Star-Studded Disappointment.”
Going in, though, she didn’t keep fighting because it’s not what women generally do. And so, writing on behalf of women in Hollywood and in offices and retail and sports and so on … she described “an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’”
The thing is, it’s hard to get paid what you’re owed if you don’t insist upon it, and that’s a real conundrum for women in the workplace – a result of the backlash effect, as Harvard Kennedy School professor Hannah Riley Bowles, Carnegie Mellon University professor Linda Babcock, and Tulane University professor Lei Lai called it in their research, which found, “sometimes it does hurt to ask.”
Participants in their study viewed women who negotiated for higher compensation as less nice than women who didn’t ask for more. Additionally, participants said they were less willing to work with the women who negotiated.
Tough game to win.
But the WNBA is made up of women who have done a lot of winning in their lives, who have trained to be fierce and tactical and who, by now, are used to getting backlash for it. They’re ambitious and audacious by nature. Driven. Hungry. And no, they’re not asking for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s forthcoming $71.25 million per season, or even Austin Reaves’ $13.9 million next season – so stop saying that.
What WNBA players are asking for is more than their current 9% sliver of revenue share – which is such a predictable ask, considering the WNBA recently secured a $2.2 billion TV rights contracts with Disney, Amazon Prime Video and new rights holder NBCUniversal. And that, per Sportico, franchise values are up 180% on average over the last 12 months, led by the expansion Golden State Valkyries, at $500 million.
Of course players are going to want a bigger bite – wouldn’t you?
Maybe not, judging from the vitriol this viral shirt moment has revved up: “It’s painfully clear these women don’t understand business …” one guy wrote, I guess because of reports that the WNBA was due to lose $40 million in 2024 – as if 14 of the NBA’s 30 teams didn’t also lose money a few years ago.
Or perhaps it’s because people believe the Caitlin Clark effect is solely responsible for the league’s surge in popularity – as if Michael Jordan, the singularly transcendent figure that he was, didn’t need a stage to perform on, a league to play in.
These aren’t solo vocalists who can tour the country with just a piano, they’re basketball players. And without the WNBA, Clark would have had to take her talents abroad and we’d be talking about the amazing Iowa star in the past tense – and that thought alone is heartbreaking.
So too is the idea that a pregame fashion statement would offend the old-fashioned sensibilities of so many, that it’s still somehow not nice for accomplished women to ask for what they believe they’re worth, to ask to be paid what they’re owed.
