Gender Equity in Professional Sports: Overview

Introduction

Gender equity in professional sports—a subject of concern throughout the history of organized sports in the United States—became a major focus of player associations and sports-advocacy groups by the twenty-first century. Women had achieved significant progress in access to sports due to the passage of the civil rights legislation Title IX in the 1970s and the establishment of major professional sports leagues and national women’s teams in sports such as soccer and ice hockey. Nevertheless, they continued to face inequity on other fronts, including pay and working conditions.

The societal conversation regarding gender equity in professional sports took on particular importance in the 2010s, when a number of women in sports—including the members of the US national women’s soccer and hockey teams and the players of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA)—began highly publicized legal proceedings against and negotiations with their sports’ governing bodies. Athletes and their supporters called for women in sports to receive pay and benefits more in line with those granted to their male counterparts, citing a long history of inequitable treatment despite women’s teams’ consistent success in international competition. Opponents of those efforts contended that men’s and women’s sports were inherently different and that the comparatively low salaries and prizes awarded to women were therefore appropriate.

Understanding the Discussion

Collective bargaining agreement: In professional sports, a contract negotiated between players’ unions and leagues that stipulates conditions such as salary and benefits.

International Federation of Association Football (FIFA): The organization governing professional competitive soccer at the international level.

Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL): Established in 2023, North America's primary women’s professional hockey league, fielding teams in both the United States and Canada, and the successor to the Premier Hockey Federation (2015–23).

Title IX: Federal legislation prohibiting educational programs or activities that receive federal funds from excluding or discriminating against any individual on the basis of sex.

United States Soccer Federation: The national organization governing the sport of soccer in the United States and overseeing domestic professional leagues as well as the women’s and men’s national soccer teams.

USA Hockey: The national organization governing both amateur ice hockey and the women’s and men’s national teams in the United States.

Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA): The United States’ primary women’s professional basketball league.

History

The extent of women’s involvement in sports and athletic activity in the United States changed dramatically between the late nineteenth century and the early twenty-first century. It evolved in response to shifting attitudes toward women’s roles in the world and a decline in the belief that women were incapable of or would be harmed by strenuous physical activity, often accompanied by pseudoscientific theories focused on physical energy and biological processes such as menstruation. Although women did participate in some athletic activities during the late nineteenth century, that involvement was largely confined to casual, noncompetitive activities that were deemed appropriately feminine.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, women had begun to form amateur athletic clubs through which to compete in sports like tennis or archery. Women attending college had the opportunity to play sports in that context at times; Vassar College, for example, was home to a women’s baseball team as early as 1866. However, collegiate women athletes were largely limited to competing against their classmates during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as bodies governing intercollegiate athletic competitions often did not permit women to participate in such events. Perhaps the most significant of those, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), would not begin to oversee women’s championships until 1981. During the mid-twentieth century, women’s intercollegiate sports programs developed under bodies such as the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (later the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women).

Collegiate women’s sports programs, and women’s sports programs as a whole, underwent a substantial change beginning in 1972, the year that saw the passage of Title IX. Introduced as one of the Education Amendments of 1972, a group of civil rights–related amendments to existing educational legislation, Title IX prohibits educational programs or activities that receive federal funds from excluding or discriminating against any individual on the basis of sex. Although the law did not specifically refer to athletic activities, its prohibition against exclusion or discrimination had the effect of prohibiting high schools, colleges, and universities that received federal funds from excluding women from their athletic programs. Following research, Title IX regulations pertaining to athletics became law in 1975. Title IX not only directly affected amateur sports programs, but also served to increase women’s participation in sports, draw greater attention to women’s sports as a whole, and, in the form of high school and college athletic programs created following its enactment, establish a valuable training ground for athletes who would go on to compete in professional sports. College basketball and soccer programs, for example, became major sources of future players for those sports’ respective professional leagues.

Another major avenue of competition for women athletes in the United States is representing the country in international events, including the Olympic Games, which originally required all competitors to be amateurs but later began to admit professional athletes. Women first appeared in the modern Olympic Games at the second such competition, held in France in 1900, though they were restricted to five sports. Twenty-two women competed during that event, and one of them, golfer Margaret Abbott, became the first US woman to win an Olympic gold medal. Although women continued to face restrictions, additional Olympic sports opened to women throughout the next years, including swimming (1912) and skiing (1936). In 1991 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) created a new policy stating that any new sport introduced into the Olympics must offer events for both men and women.

While most sporting opportunities for women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were amateur rather than professional, limited opportunities to play sports for pay emerged during that period, including the creation of traveling teams that competed in baseball and basketball. A professional women’s baseball league, known for a portion of its existence as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, was formed during World War II and remained in operation during the mid-1950s. Additional small women’s leagues for a variety of team sports developed over the subsequent decades, as did professional organizations for individual sports like golf. By the 2010s, major women’s professional sports leagues in the United States included the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), which had its inaugural season in 1997; the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), a successor to multiple earlier professional soccer leagues that began play in 2013; and the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), which debuted with the 2015–16 season and was later rebranded the Premier Hockey League (PHF).

Although significant progress had been made in terms of US women’s participation in professional team sports by the 2010s, further concerns arose during that period, particularly regarding pay equity. With leagues for both men and women generating revenue through multiple streams, including ticket sales, television broadcasts, sponsorship, and merchandising, among salaried professional athletes, men typically made significantly more money than women. Prior to the development of a new collective bargaining agreement in 2020, for example, the maximum annual salary earned by any player in the WNBA was $117,500, while top salaries in the all-male National Basketball Association (NBA) exceeded $30 million per year. International tournaments with cash prizes exhibited similar disparities: the prize for winning first place in the 2018 men’s International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) World Cup was $38 million, while the prize for the following year’s Women’s World Cup was $4 million. Additionally, women in professional sports at times played in smaller or less comfortable facilities, were not consistently granted benefits such as insurance or paid maternity leave, and had limited access to sponsorships or marketing opportunities.

Given those issues, multiple women’s teams sought to attain higher pay and more opportunities through contract negotiations and, when deemed necessary, work stoppages. Several US Women’s National Team (USWNT) members filed a wage-discrimination complaint against the United States Soccer Federation in 2016, and in 2019 the team as a whole sued US Soccer for gender discrimination based on a history of inequitable pay, working conditions, and transportation. The US national women’s ice hockey team took action against their governing body, USA Hockey, in 2017 and planned to boycott the International Ice Hockey Federation World Championship while negotiating for equitable pay and benefits. The women’s ice hockey team and USA Hockey ultimately came to an agreement that in addition to the women’s team being guaranteed a prize money pool, the men’s and women’s teams would receive equitable travel arrangements and insurance coverage.

Efforts to secure gender equity extended into the domestic professional leagues as well. In early 2020 WNBA players and league leadership agreed to an eight-year collective bargaining agreement that, among other provisions, increased overall salaries, raised the salary cap for established players, required the NBA to increase the marketing of the WNBA, and tied revenue sharing to league growth. The following year, players for the National Women’s Soccer League (NSWL) launched the No More Side Hustles awareness campaign, publicizing stories of their second and third jobs to highlight the low pay in female professional athletic leagues.

Players and activists calling for and behind such negotiations argued that women deserved to be treated fairly for their work in the same sports as men, especially as they performed just as well as, if not even better than, their male counterparts. This assertion was often brought up in discussion of the USWNT’s 2019 lawsuit against US Soccer, as they had won four of the Women’s World Cups since 1991. When a federal judge in California ruled against the USWNT in May 2020, opponents’ arguments regarding unequal work performance due to physiological differences, differences in revenue generation, and the nature of collective bargaining agreements were represented. Though this ruling meant that the legal fight for equal pay was dismissed, the USWNT argued that pay and bonus rates in terms of the number of wins had not been properly considered, which led them to file an appeal in the summer of 2021. In early 2022, the team and US Soccer reached a $24 million settlement on the issue. Additionally, as part of the agreement, a new collective bargaining agreement in which pay would be equalized would need to be approved by the team. These contracts, establishing not only equal compensation for individual competitions but also for World Cup participation, were agreed upon by that May. The agreement additionally funded grants to support female participation in soccer.

The outcome of the USNWT suit inspired similar gender pay equity challenges by women's national soccer teams in Canada, Jamaica, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, and the United Kingdom. It also contributed to calls for improved working conditions and equal compensation at the FIFA Women's World Cup—which in 2023 offered twice as much in prize money as at the 2019 tournament but was still only about one-quarter of the 2022 World Cup takings. FIFA announced that it hoped to provide equal prizes within four years.

The COVID-19 pandemic briefly interrupted business as usual, leading to travel complications and delayed or shortened seasons across many sports as leagues and teams grappled with policies to curb disease transmission. However, women's professional sports benefited in the longer term, as they returned to play before men's teams did and thus enjoyed unprecedented prime-time coverage, growing viewership and popularity, and increased investment, including from current and former athletes. It also contributed to changes in travel arrangements, such as the WNBA's summer 2022 announcement that the league would allow charter flights for players, who traditionally had to take commercial flights, for Finals games. The number of regular-season games were also expanded to forty and the bonus pool for the postseason raised to around $500,000 at that time. The following year, the WNBA extended charter flights to teams playing in consecutive regular-season games and for all those appearing in postseason playoffs.

Women's professional hockey also underwent further transformation, with the acquisition and dissolution of the PHF in 2023. Ahead of its inaugural season, its successor, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), negotiated and signed an eight-year collective bargaining agreement with the newly formed players' union that July. The historic deal included provisions on base salaries, expenses, per diem compensation, retirement accounts, benefits (including insurance, pregnancy benefits, and parental leave), relocation, roster size, travel, and safety and working conditions.

Gender Equity in Professional Sports Today

The 2024 WBNA Draft brought renewed attention to gender pay disparity in professional sports, when Caitlin Clark, the league's number-one pick that year, received a four-year contract for $338,056, as compared to the top 2024 NBA Draft pick, Zaccharie Risacher, whose initial contract was for $57.2 million. In response to public outcry, WNBA officials pointed out that Clark would likely receive a combined $3 million during that period from base salary, marketing agreements, endorsements, and other partnerships. WBNA players frequently rely on such additional revenue streams as well as coaching, sports broadcasting, or playing overseas during the WNBA's offseason.

At the same time, athletes objected to and resisted the longstanding practice of making women's athletic attire conform to prevailing aesthetic ideas about femininity, rather than designing it for optimal physical performance. One high-profile example of this was the backlash over Nike's 2024 Olympic track uniforms, which many believed unduly sexualized female athletes' bodies.

Similarly, as athletes became increasingly frank about their menstrual periods and performance anxiety in the early to mid 2020s, some elite sports organizations began changing their uniform requirements. Most notably, the prestigious Wimbledon tennis tournament relaxed its longstanding all-white attire requirement to allow female competitors to wear dark-colored shorts under their uniforms beginning in 2024. Similarly, the NSWL team Orlando Pride, the English and New Zealand national soccer teams, and the Irish national women’s rugby team all changed their uniform colors, while still others adopted “period-proof” attire designed to prevent leaks.

These essays and any opinions, information, or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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