Madison McCord
The Communicator

Female professional athletes do not deserve equal pay to professional male athletes.

This is a bold, and completely chauvinistic comment that proves a gender barrier still exists, but why does it need to be taken that way? I’m not trying to say that men have bigger brains, or that girls have cooties, but it is a statistically proven fact that men are bigger, stronger, faster and more athletically able than women.

The major platform in the argument against equal pay is the difference in athletic ability. It’s a fact that men are more skilled in athletic competition, some women may have better technique or accuracy.  Put Jamaican Olympic sprinter, Usain Bolt, and his blistering 9.69 second 100 meter dash heat in the finals of the 2008 Summer Olympics against the 10.78 seconds it took Jamaican female sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser to run the same distance.

In February of 2007, The Championships at Wimbledon, announced for the first time that men and women would be paid the same amount in prize money. This announcement came after the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) became disgruntled with tournament directors. Since then, both men and women receive around $1.5 million despite the men playing two more qualification rounds, and five set matches compared to the three set matches women play. 

Even though the female theory of equal pay for unequal effort is deranged, it’s not just the extra time put into a male championship, but also the fan base and economic pulse a male-driven sport produces compared to a female-driven sport. 

Despite a rain dampened game five of the 2008 world series which moved the games final 3.5 innings to a different day, Fox, the television channel who carried the series, reported 19.8 million viewers tuned in for these final innings alone.

Compare that number to the most popular professional women’s sport by television ratings, basketball, and the WNBA’s 2008 championship’s decisive game three, which pulled in an astounding  280,000 viewers. So mathematically speaking, the World Series had three times as many viewers per out, than the entire WNBA three game series.

The final point proving equal pay is not an option is how these teams and athletes affect their local economy and home team moral. The average attendance for a NBA team in 2008 was just over 17,000 per game. Compare that to the NBA’s sister league, the WNBA, which seated over 7,300 per game in 2008. With NBA teams pulling in over 10,000 more fans a game at around $30 a ticket, the NBA is pouring about $300,000 per game more into any given local economy than the WNBA, which allows for more job creation and a lower unemployment rate. This stat leaves out the overwhelmingly large amounts of NBA memorabilia and team apparel sales. 

I fully support the idea of fiscal equality in any and every professional job setting, whether the employees in question are of an opposite gender or an opposite race, but it is time for the athletic world to realize the fact that businesses already have: if a certain employee is more productive, effective, and beneficial, they deserve a larger salary.

You can contact the writer at staffwriter@spokanefalls.edu

Judy Johnson
The Communicator

Female athletes do not get the recognition or pay that their male counterparts do.

Despite social attempts to equalizing genders, women athletes still receive the lower salaries and are still looked down upon by males because they do not bring in the same amount of fans as the male athletes.

The very fact that it is okay to degrade women by saying their athleticism is not good enough to get paid the same as men is ridiculous.  Women that play sports should receive the support and encouragement to continue playing and  receive the salaries should compensate that would render the need to have a different job unnecessary.   

Sports Illustrated releases an annual edition of their magazine called The Fortunate 50 showing the top 50 paid athletes in the United States, and the top 20 paid athletes internationally after their endorsements.

The 2008 issue showed that none of the 50 athletes featured from the United States are female. The $127,902,706 million that Tiger Woods will accumulate in 2008, making a total of almost $800 million in his 13 year career was number one.

The magazine also shows that out of the international top 20 only one woman is on the list. At slot 13, Russian professional tennis player, Maria Sharapova pulls in an estimated annual salary of $21,758,550.

Along with this years figures, there are many other factors that explain why professional female athletes should be paid equivalent salaries to men.  If these women are supposed to be “tougher” or more “masculine” to compete with male salaries, then the judgment of a woman’s body type needs to be thrown out the window.  As long as female athletes are required to adhere to society’s appearance codes of femininity, there is no room for these women to be able to bulk up and be considered normal.

The stereotypical role women have, taking care of the household and children, creates the problem of availability to work out and practice because there is a time for dinner that must be upheld.

Having higher salaries comparable to that of male athletes would make it to where women would not have to rely on someone else to help out with their bills during the season or would not have to work another job.

Finally, there is the precedent that the United States Government has already set to show equality.

“Title Nine, a Federal statute that was created to prohibit sex discrimination in education programs that receive Federal financial assistance,” according to www.ncaa.org.  

Title Nine only protects and ensures programs for female athletes in high schools and colleges that receive federal funds, but it does not protect professional female athletes.

Title Nine, which was passed in 1972, has been carried out for the most part since then.  

Since professional women are not covered in Title Nine, they are not treated equally on the courts and fields.   

Progression for women has slowly been made over time in our nation in the attempt to create an equal country.

There is no reason why women should not be eligible to play the same sports and have the same pay as men. 

You can contact the writer at staffwriter@spokanefalls.edu