Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green poke at length about the pay discrepancy between men’s and women’s sports teams on Twitter.
Green’s tweets were posted as the UConn Huskies and Iowa Hawkeyes faced off in Saturday’s Sweet 16.
“I’ve been seeing a lot of talk about the pay gap between women and men. Especially in sports. It’s not even close,” Green wrote. “But let’s stop allowing y’all complaints to fall on deaf ears due to numbers. As long as y’all make the argument about pay, while the revenue stays the same they will continue to point at the revenue not being high enough to cover bigger salaries. While that is true in damn near every business, how do we take that card out of their pockets? That’s the key to changing the pay.”
Jonathan Vanian of Fortune reported that the average salary for a WNBA player during the 2019-20 season was $75,000, while the average salary for an NBA player in the same season was approximately $7.7 million.
“There’s no argument for lack of revenue unless you make those that say they stand for women actually stand up. The NBA wasn’t always the global game that it is today. It wasn’t always driving as much revenue as it does today. But there were people behind it, building the platform, and more importantly telling INDIVIDUAL stories and building up the interest in the players. That’s how the game took off. Who’s building up y’all platform? Who’s telling the individual stories of how great y’all are? Building the interest and transforming women’s basketball into a global game?”
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USWNT legend Megan Rapinoe and Liberty’s star Layshia Clarendon were not thrilled to see his comments.
“Shout out to NBA guys who come to tell people in women’s sports what we need to do to grow the game,” Clarendon tweeted. “Thanks, now we’ll ask for more resources, tell the powers at be to tell our stories more, and generally just start to push things ‘like the NBA.’ Problems solved.”
“And you know who largely are the gatekeepers to that money, investment, resources, capital, time and sponsorship dollars are?” Rapinoe said. “Men. Do you know who men listen to? Other men.
“Just like with fights around all other social issues, change cannot be made if the only people who care about the change enough are the ones who are suffering the most from it.”
ESPN’s Maria Taylor took issue with Green’s comments as well:
Napheesa Collier of the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx spoke up:
