Women's Sports and Salary Caps

It's no news that women are paid less than men in professional group sports but is it really surprising? Sports are dictated by commercialism and revenue. Simple economics dictate which athletes receive higher salaries and which sports receive primetime exposure. NBA games have almost double the attendance of WNBA games. And those that are watched more can charge more for their advertising space, are able to commercialize more products in the mainstream market and receive more attention in the press. This all leads to more attention and even more profits. However, there is a much more primal reason why men's sports actually do receive more attention.

At its most basic level, men and sports have an anthropological connection. Helen Fisher, anthropologist at Rutgers University says that ''Both sexes like the exercise and challenge of sports, but for men it's also a basic display behavior for impressing and winning a mate.''

On the commercial level, more men watch sports than women and even more surprising, more men watch women's sports than women. The only exceptions to this are individual sports like tennis, gymnastics and figure skating, and the Olympic games. More women watch the Olympics than men, opening up the airfields to advertisers targeting women. In the 2002 winter Olympics, women comprised 56% of the television audience in the 18-49 year old age group.

But there are just not enough men watching because women don't run as fast, jump as high or are as physically aggressive as their male counterparts. While these characteristics may not be needed for women to succeed in their chosen sport, it is important for the men watching them. Nobody is saying that there aren't some women who are able to physically perform at the same level and even better than some men but those are the exceptions and not the norm, and in group sports, the norm almost always has to be evident at some point to fill up the numbers.

A big part of men and sports is also centered upon competition, making pools and bet wagers. Pool managers set up bets on most tackles and most points, and their lack of knowledge about female players makes it much less exciting when it comes to the major bet of the night. Men are also more prone to be watching ESPN and their sport of choice usually involves male players, which makes a big difference to advertisers running their commercials on sport networks as well as primetime TV.

The disparity in women's sport viewership is somewhat disconcerting because American women actually do better in competition than their male counterparts. In the 2004 Olympics, The U.S. women's soccer, basketball and softball team all won gold medals while the men's teams didn't really do as well. In soccer, women have won the World Cup twice while the men never have. But it all comes down to numbers and as long as men's sports are more popular among the largest population watching them and giving advertisers revenue, professional women athletes will be getting less money.