Soccer star Megan Rapinoe is still complaining about equal pay for women’s athletes, compounding her economic illiteracy with a victimhood complex.
Rapinoe responded to NBA player Draymond Green criticizing female athletes for “just complaining” about their pay, saying that, “to have someone who does know what it’s like to be oppressed, in many ways, to heap that all back on female players, or people who play female sports, is just really disappointing.”
That’s right. One millionaire is saying she is oppressed because she’s a woman and says another millionaire should understand the feeling of being oppressed because he is black. It’s the identity politics victimhood act perfectly illustrated, made even funnier by the fact that Green was trying to advise female athletes to pressure woke corporations into putting their money where their mouths are.
Nothing Rapinoe says addresses Green’s core point. “It’s coming off as a complaint because people that can change it,” Green said, “they’re just going to continue to say, ‘Well, the revenue isn’t there, so if you don’t bring in the revenue, we can’t up your pay.’”
The fact remains that, most of the time, men’s sports bring in substantially more revenue than women’s sports. It’s certainly true for basketball, where the NBA has subsidized the WNBA for years. And it turns out that when women bring in more revenue, as the U.S. Women’s National Team that Rapinoe was a part of, they are, in fact, paid more than the men are paid.
The argument then shifts to the idea that a league such as the WNBA can be just as successful as the NBA if it gets support. After all, the NBA had a lower average attendance in 1957 than the WNBA did in 2018 when both leagues were the same age, two time periods that are obviously comparable. In reality, it took the NBA eight seasons to receive a national television contract. The WNBA received one right when it started in 1997.
People watch professional sports to see the best athletes in the world perform at the highest level. The WNBA can be fun to watch, especially if you simply love the sport of basketball, but a league with 22 dunks in 24 seasons is simply not going to generate the same level of excitement as the NBA or even college basketball. The same is true for soccer: The USWNT 2019 World Cup victory peaked at roughly 20 million viewers in the United States, whereas the Men’s Team pulled 24.7 million in 2014 for a group stage match against Portugal.
The “equal pay” discussion for female athletes is not about oppression. It’s about basic economic realities that people such as Rapinoe find inconvenient. The forced comparisons to men’s sports serve only to dull the possible enthusiasm for women’s sports, ignoring all that is unique about women’s sports while highlighting the differences between the two.
