After dropping my daughter off at school one recent morning, I listened to an NPR report on the WNBA players’ new contract. I do not follow professional basketball, either women’s or men’s, but I played and dearly loved the game as a youth. So, I listened avidly to the report.
It was NPR, so the reporting wasn’t objective. The clear intention was to promote the WNBA and, more importantly, the feminist agenda of “equality of the sexes.” The NPR interviewer, A Martinez, risibly gushed over the virtues of the league, and his reporting was clearly skewed in the direction of “Look how exploited these poor female athletes are!”
Annie Costabile, a reporter with Front Office Sports, an online news site covering the sports business, described the pay raise WNBA players are getting as something that would finally allow an immiserated population to reach a minimal level of human dignity. “For the first time, this is really a livable wage,” she responded to Martinez’s question about whether, finally, finally, the struggling WNBA players would be able to survive on just their league salaries and not be required to work (that is, play) in Europe over the summer. In other words, to work year-round like the rest of us do.
What is the “livable wage” WNBA players will now receive? Costabile gave the negotiated minimum salary as $270,000 a year. The average American might be interested to hear that number given as merely “livable,” when the national average annual salary is somewhere south of $65,000. And someone should tell most of my tenured faculty colleagues at the private university at which I teach, because they make considerably less than that.
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