Equal pay in sport

[ControvertialYeti]

AIBU to entertain the idea that women and men should NOT be paid equally in sport.

I really hope this doesn’t come across like I am trying to trigger hate, i am genuinely trying to explore my personal thoughts on feminism in this area in an effort to identify and change any prejudices I have or that I was unaware of.

People often say I am a poor feminist. Currently, I do not believe female and male athletes should be paid equally in sport and am honestly very happy to be convinced otherwise (so long as no-one is rude of obnoxious in their replies)

What is a fair way to gauge funding in sport?

A-If you are paying athletes wages based on effort, the top female and top male athletes must get paid the same because they are equally putting in as much effort to get to that level? right? But then if you are paying athletes based on effort? how can one say that the bottom female and male athletes shouldn’t get paid as much as the top ones? because they are equally putting in as much effort? they are working just as hard? For a low ranking football team to win anything you might even say they have to put in more effort as they don’t have access to the equipment, training facilities or coaches? should they be paid more? That doesn’t seem quite fair I suppose?

B-If we are paying our athletes based on performance? (i.e. who runs the fastest or who scores the most goals?) then shouldn’t the pay equate to the performance? In which case top male 100m sprinters should probably get more (probably proportionately) if they sprint faster than a) top women 100m sprinters and b) bottom male 100m sprinters? However, I’m not really sure that sounds fair either?

C-If we pay athletes based on the level of entertainment it provides (as it stands in most elite sports the whole industry is mostly funded through spectators either directly or indirectly) so surely if more people want to watch women’s 100m hurdles than mens rugby league, the money should reflect that? but that doesn’t actually seem that fair either as just because a sport isn’t popular (like BMX riding shouldn’t mean it gets discriminated against?

D- We could pay all athletes the same amount. Ie any gender, any sport, every level capped? I think that is probably the most fair but its likely to mean the prize money in all sport takes a significant hit, and consequentially the quality is likely to take a big hit, which I can’t see anyone getting on board with.

At the moment (for me personally) the most sensible and fair approach seems to be a mixture of B and C. Performance should be rewarded but only to the extent that spectators value seeing it. Which i believe is somewhere close to what we have at present. Seeing Lewis Hamilton wizz round the track might be worth a £400 ticket at Silverstone but Plymouth Argyle women’s team might only be worth £5.50 on a Sunday?
However, with this approach, its likely that less popular sports or athletes of not as objectively high individual performance, will face financial discrimination. But while I find it hard to rationalise this as it does prejudices against female athletes or sports people don’t want to watch. However, I’m
not sure it’s necessarily wrong as I find it hard to appreciate any alternatives without de-incentivising quality in sport or under rewarding sports that spectators have more desire to watch?

Seeing Lewis Hamilton wizz round the track might be worth a £400 ticket at Silverstone

It really isn't! When I took my late OH to the F1 GP we spent a lot of time looking a screens to be able to follw the action, at Hamilton's speed it's all a blur!
To respond to your question I really don't think that male and female tennis players should be paid equally until they all play 5 sets! Other sports are more problematical. You would expect to pay more to see a top flight football team, men or women, than one of the lower teams.

If women footballers were paid the same as the men, women's teams and fa would be broke after week one

Look at WNBA for example. It's subsidised heavily by NBA but still loses millions

I am not generally interested in sport as whole but I believe in Wimbledon females play less time than men? if so then no equal pay does not make sense

But for football/cricket if they play the same time then I presume they should be on the same pay

but I don't think any individual is worth 60 million pounds (a made up figure) regardless of whether male/female

But I also presume they don't just pay millions to one male and very little to a female just because of their sex? I presume the pay rate they get is a lot more complex involving tv rights/sponsorship/attendance etc. and so can't comment as I don't understand it all.

I preum

By that token, if a man identifies as a woman to play an elite sport, does he take a commensurate pay cut? And if a woman identifies as a man, will she be paid more?

@ImaSababa

By that token, if a man identifies as a woman to play an elite sport, does he take a commensurate pay cut? And if a woman identifies as a man, will she be paid more?

Depends if they're any good

An average male tennis player would make more money playing in the women's game

A good female footballer wouldn't be playing anywhere near the top level in men's football

Aren’t you confusing two different things here?

Female athletes are paid less than male athletes when competing at equivalent levels in the same sport. A really good example of this is the fact that players on the US women’s soccer team are paid less than players on the US men’s soccer team despite being objectively significantly more successful. It’s very hard to justify that on any basis - they are doing the same job, and being paid less than men for it, simply because they are women.

That’s not the same as saying every sport should be equally paid. Comparing F1 and football is comparing apples and oranges.

I am not generally interested in sport as whole but I believe in Wimbledon females play less time than men? if so then no equal pay does not make sense

This only makes sense if you consider the job of tennis to only be the match itself. Women play 3 sets where men play 5, but both men and women are doing the same amount of training and practice. As a percentage of their overall time spent working, the extra two sets men play at grand slams is absolutely tiny - significantly less than the percentage difference in the respective prize money for men and women.

The problem is it's like everything in society. The demand led principle of pay tends to lead a small group of individuals at the very top (CEOs/top footballers etc) being paid grossly disproportionately, as value is over attributed to those individuals. In current society, we have failed to demand a sufficient degree of central redistributive mechanics (US salary caps in NFL are a step in the right direction though).

Why pay more for kicking/throwing a ball round pitch A than those who do so round pitch B?

It's not standardised between sports, or let alone clubs within the same sport

Frankly I think the amount some in sports and entertainment is obscenely high, and I wouid like to see it lowered.

Which would narrow the sports gender pay gap

I think an important further angle on this is the value of sponsorships and advertising deals.

if you take football as an example, the vast majority of income for clubs in the top divisions comes from TV deals, which in turn comes from the number of people willing to pay to watch games. As it stands in the UK, far more people are willing to pay to watch men play than women play.
Those are the raw facts, but what you can't measure is whether the success of the men's game over the women's game is due to a perceived higher entertainment value, or merely a reflection of the underlying sexism in the country. I suspect it's more of the latter than the former.

A good example of how the system of pricing is screwed up is the cost of sky tv. Sky do not recover the obscene amount they pay the premier league for tv rights from the people who pay for Sky Sports packages. They literally hand over too much money for it. They (and BT) then spread the cost through ALL their customers. It overvalues football viewership.

I think it’s also worth considering why women’s sport is less popular than men’s - I believe it has been undervalued and treated as less important, and therefore public interest in it is lower. When you have an event like the London olympics which many people are invested in, there is a huge amount of interest in women’s sport. Look at all the buzz around Jessica Ennis-Hill’s Olympic gold, for example, or KJT’s performance. I think that if women’s sport was given the dame airtime and level of punditry as male sport, there would be just as much interest in it.

I watch football and tennis, women's is OK but it's not elite sport and I wouldn't pay to watch it. That's brutal I know but it's honest. Women aren't as fast or as powerful and really that's the only thing that makes sport interesting unless your girlfriend is in the team
Sport pay is demand led.

That’s interesting because I have the complete opposite feeling. I find men’s tennis can get tedious because it’s often just about who has the strength to slug it out for longer. I find women’s tennis more dynamic, clever and unpredictable.

Football is the same whether it’s men or women - I don’t find it particularly interesting either way, but I can’t see how as a game it is more about strength and speed than it is about agility and precision (which are not traits in which one gender excels over the other).

Then there are predominantly women’s sports which are fabulous to watch but get virtually no airtime. I so loved watching the netball when the commonwealth games were on. It’s such an exciting, clever, fast-paced sport. With football you watch for 90 minutes and get a couple of goals if you’re lucky. With netball, there are points scored every minute, and the leaderboard can change in a heartbeat. I would love to see some investment in netball to get it shown more widely on tv, and I bet there would be a market for it if it was advertised and presented with even a fraction of the investment of football.

In general, supply and demand with some structural anomalies. There are hundreds of sports and only a few are vastly rewarded, almost all have, I think, men paid more. You could argue that reflects structural discrimination in governing bodies and broadcast deals.

The following figures may be wrong but the USA soccer players being paid and rewarded (flights and accommodation) differently by the governing body when tournament and media payments didn't support this looked sexist.

That said, I recall some figures when Notts County? stopped their women's football team after losses of £100,000s/almost £1m when paid attendances were in the 10s/100s of spectators per match and player salaries vastly exceeded revenue. There was an argument about long-term building of the women's sport but spectators didn't seem willing to pay.

I think we should pay women’s sports exactly the same, same airtime, same publicity for 50 years.

Then we’ll know for sure whether its current lack of pay /popularity is down to factors of social discrimination or not.

Remember women’s football was very popular until it was banned. So it’s not always about strength.

Tennis is the stand out one.

No way should they be paid the same.

Women should be paid the same when the spectatorship matches men’s sport. Sorry to say but women’s tennis is so boring that I would never choose to watch it over the men’s game.

But how is the spectatorship ever going to match when there is so much less investment? It’s shown less on tv, it’s promoted less, it’s reported on less. These all have a dampening effect on spectatorship. So you end up in a chicken / egg situation where investment is dependent on engagement which is dependent on investment.

To me,tennis is the one I'd agree on equal pay. Wimbledon has both sexes there and they are both interesting if in slightly different ways.

Women's football however is crap. It's slow, the technique is poor and it's boring. I wouldn't open my curtains if the England women's team were playing in my garden

I am not generally interested in sport as whole but I believe in Wimbledon females play less time than men? if so then no equal pay does not make sense

Presumably then you also think marathon runners should be paid hundreds of times the prize money that sprinters get?

The obvious solution is to scrap the division between men and women in sport. Everyone plays in the same leagues, the same teams, the same matches. None of this dated "women are weaker so need protecting from those men by making a separate tournament for them" nonsense. We don't discriminate by race in sport, nobody says BAME and non-BAME people can't play together, we should segregate female from non-female athletes either.

@RomeoLikedCapuletGirls

I think we should pay women’s sports exactly the same, same airtime, same publicity for 50 years.

Then we’ll know for sure whether its current lack of pay /popularity is down to factors of social discrimination or not.

Remember women’s football was very popular until it was banned. So it’s not always about strength.

Or, make all the sports unisex and then only the best will make all the money whichever sex. Yeah, thought not.

Everyone harping on about the tennis.

The men only play best of 5 sets in the Grand Slam events. So 4 tournaments a year.

All the other events are best of 3, same as the women.

Also, it's been widely debated that there needs to be a shake up anyway as the average viewer, doesn't have the attention span anymore for a long 3+ hour match.

That's why they introduced tiebreaks, last set tiebreaks, no add, no let etc to get the match time lower and more predictable.

OP i agree. There are some sports i think the pay should be closer/similar, such as tennis. As men and women play on same courts during same tournament.

However, football etc i don't think so as womens football doesn't generate the same income as mens, and that is largely what pays the salaries