Players of the WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association) constantly face questions about their personal life, sexuality, basketball IQ, and many times male basketball players ask them questions related to the game in public. Women are, in short, instructed to return to the kitchen and the clear message which comes out is that women cannot play any ball games. According to CNBC, WNBA players receive 20% of NBA salaries, also, 20% of league revenue compared with 50% of their male counterparts.
WNBA matches receive very less crowd and the additional factor is that people do not give female sports equal importance as men's sports. WNBA player Imani McGee-Stafford said that when she was 12 and used to play against a male team they kept on calling out fouls and also demotivated the girls by saying disrespectful words. Mistie Bass was not given an opportunity to play in middle school as she was the only girl who played basketball in school. A’ja Wilson said that in college she was teased with lines like, “Go back to the kitchen”, and when her effective and powerful gameplay was seen she was compared with her seniors and even professionals so that she would lose the spirit of the game.
The worst thing that female basketball players have to face is that they are considered to be lesbian and are replied to tweets calling them transgenders who hate men. The comparison is that female athletes have to answer questions about their sexual life, family, when they want to have kids, or what they are wearing. Mistie Bass said that she was always questioned whether she is a lesbian or not, which has no relation to basketball. Delle Donne on her Twitter account was questioned whether she can make sandwiches or has she decided to spend her whole life playing basketball.
The main problem is that people who do not know how to judge whether the gameplay is good or bad, which shot was correct or a miracle, without knowing these things people fundamentally consider women sports as less interesting than men. Female basketball players encounter men counterparts questioning them as egoistic, as many men players are not able to digest the success of their female counterparts. A WNBA player thinks that basketball is a game that can be played at a young age no matter how bad they are. They would go on to challenge a female in a match just because the opponent is a female people consider they can beat her. They just do not see the talent in women and the stamina they the only thing they do is that they compare them to a man and consider them as much less.
One more shocking fact is that the average pay for a WNBA player is $116,000 while for men in the NBA is about $7.5 million on average. The cause for this shocking pay gap is that WNBA falls short of funds and also WNBA very little viewership compared to NBA. The WNBA makes only $25 million annually while the NBA makes a whopping $7.5 billion per year. The WNBA also receives less money in broadcast rights than the NBA, in fact, they can earn up to 15 times more than the salaries offered by the WNBA.
Many times people have not watched WNBA games and still keep on making derogatory comments about the game just on the basis of what others said, the problem is that people without knowing the whole thing just listen to a part of it and spread stories. If you have heard from other people that WNBA is not good then it is fine but degrading the image of the game and spreading this thought is not good. When watching a WNBA match, we are fundamentally coerced to find the negatives rather than look at the game from an objective perspective.
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