“Bet on Women”: Understanding the Wage Gap

This chapter highlights the role of the labour movement and the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) in securing a transformative new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) in 2020. I demonstrate how the WNBPA cleverly positioned themselves to receive a big pay rise by arguing that the league needed to ‘Bet on Women.’ In doing so WNBA players refused to go along with the narrative that they deserved low pay and that they should be grateful to even have a league, a common narrative in women’s sports. I contend that while there is an enormous amount of labour that players must undertake to grow the league, ‘the athletic labour of femininity,’ they are determined to grow the WNBA for the future. This chapter concludes by examining some of the misogynistic responses to the WNBA from media and fans that provide a barrier to its growth, using the notions of popular feminism and misogyny to argue that these responses are part of a larger mobilisation of misogyny that includes a lack of investment in women’s sport. The league has had difficulty in landing on a marketing strategy to combat this, particularly in contrast to other sportswomen, such as soccer players, who more easily fit the mode of white, athletic femininity that is valued as a hypervisible body.