Women’s soccer team is “underpaid”? Women’s basketball is treated unfairly by the NCAA? Relatively few people are interested in watching women’s soccer, which is why it’s players earn less. The same logic explains why men’s soccer vs men’s basketball salaries are different by orders of magnitude. It’s very simple, but the goal of this author is to frame this as an inequality based on prejudice and sexism, rather than simply the free-market consequences of viewer preferences.

Look at viewership and understand that pay is based on the amount of revenue generated by a team, which is very tightly correlated to the number of people watching. NBA vs. WNBA average viewership: 15 million for the men, 231,000 for the women. Eyeballs on screens = pay. Perhaps the government should mandate that people watch more women’s sports in order to decrease the pay gap?

The issue of biological men participating in women’s sports is unrelated to salary differences. Biological men, with all of their physical advantages, can and do dominate women’s sports when they are allowed to compete with them–it is why the two categories exist in the first place! It is unfair and can be dangerous. Men are bigger, faster, and stronger, and to deny the differences between a man and a woman here shows how far some people are willing to go to tow the line. “Follow the science”, unless it means we have to acknowledge biology doesn’t result in equal outcomes in all things.