Equal Pay for Coverage

Women's sports are surging, but media outlets seem to perpetuate inequity

I was recently scrolling job postings and came across one for a women’s sports reporter at a big city paper. Like many of its peers, the outlet had done a poor job of covering women’s sports through the years. I was heartened to see that could be changing.

Then I saw the level of compensation for the role.

Is there a better analogy for the way women’s sports are treated by the marketplace than offering those reporters the very lowest rung on the pay scale?

A few caveats. That pay, starting at $60,000 is certainly in line with some of the other salaries there for entry level staff, but it is hardly enough to live on in a city like New York. Meanwhile, sports reporters covering the NFL, NBA or college football in big cities can earn twice that. Truth is, sports media adopted the value set of the professional sports marketplace long ago, even though covering women’s sports require the same amount of work from reporters.

Perhaps I should just be grateful a paper plans to cover women’s sports at all.

Yeah, not anymore.

People who want to cover women’s sports — men and women — face the same historic lack of investment that women playing sports have over the years. It’s as if those paychecks have been signed, “No one cares about women’s sports.”

I know this because I was an original columnist at espnW, the women’s sports and culture vertical that was founded by Laura Gentile at ESPN in 2010. For the next seven years, I was part of the efforts made for the group to advance the storytelling around women in sports and the stories that would appeal to women and men who watched sports — an audience that was hard to quantify.

As we reach a moment filled with economic optimism, few of those core contributors who were part of the launch of espnW and advocated relentlessly for more coverage and resources for the effort are still at the network. In fact, even as I see many of my male colleagues at ESPN have retained their front-facing roles, many of the women have been quietly benched for younger hosts and sideline reporters.

Those women are excellent. Andraya Carter, Chiney Ogwumike and Elle Duncan are an absolute delight to watch at the WNBA post-game desk, and I hope they are as well paid as their male counterparts. But there still isn’t a regular show devoted to women’s sports or a women’s league in the way Inside the NFL covers the league.

I hope this changes.

For the last five years I’ve been a columnist and educator, and I have so many women in my classes who care about women’s sports and want to make a career of covering them. As much as I appreciate how they are unburdened by the hierarchy of coverage that exists, I know first-hand how few spots there are at the table and how poorly they are often paid relative to the men who cover men’s sports.

Media outlets take advantage of the passion we have in order to staff these roles that they half-heartedly post. And once hired, reporters can face internal reluctance for the coverage itself. As of the start of the 2024 WNBA season, just two major newspapers covered their local WNBA team like a travel beat — the Washington Post and Chicago Sun-Times. Certainly newspapers have cut back on beat coverage as the industry declined in the last decade, but many men’s teams still get that coverage.

The excellent research project Michael Messier and Cheryl Cooky did around coverage of women’s sports from the 1990s until 2019 showed just 4-5% of SportsCenter highlights featured women athletes and leagues — and ESPN had the rights for women’s college basketball, all four tennis majors and the WNBA during that era.

Editors may make the argument that they don’t see much interest in women’s sports. Neither did James Dolan as owner of the Liberty in 2019, when the team played in the 2,000-seat Westchester County Center. New owner Clara Wu Tsai did see a larger market, and the Liberty just averaged 18,000 fans at the Barclays Center in the WNBA finals on their way to the first franchise championship.

You can’t put 18,000 fans in a 2,000 seat arena, but you can use a 2,000-seat arena to justify lack of investment. Likewise, media outlets across the spectrum are tacitly pointing to a lack of interest in inadequate coverage to justify a lack of investment and value.

When the US Women’s National Team focused on the inequity within the context of US Soccer, it took years of advocacy — with fans even chanting “Equal Pay!” on the soccer fields of France during the 2019 World Cup — to get movement on the issue. It took the men’s team agreeing to reopen their own Collective Bargaining Agreement with US Soccer to restructure the compensation in such a way that gave the women equal value for their efforts and wins as the men. And this was for a women’s team with four World Cup championships since FIFA created the category in 1991. The American men’s best finish was in 1930, and in the modern era it has reached a quarterfinal.

“My major bugaboo is ‘Women are making progress,’” women’s sports historian Jean Williams told me for an article I wrote for the New York Daily News in 2019. “The problem is not women. We’ve been playing [soccer] for 150 years. The fact is we’ve got a rigidly enforced labor market that women didn’t create.”

I’ve returned to her quote many times since as I wrote the upcoming: “The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women’s Sports.” At this moment, “a rigidly enforced labor market” is a concept that could also apply to the people who want to cover women’s sports.

In sports media, there is no such solidarity between writers of different beats, nor is there much insight into what the compensation is for these roles. New York, with its pay transparency requirements, is one of the few places with any visibility into that market. We aren’t represented in a way that would allow collective bargaining for a change to the compensation structure, and writers are often discouraged from revealing their salaries lest it get back to management as another writer negotiates a raise.

Women make, according to various estimates, 80 cents to the dollar that men make. Even less for women of color. The compensation framing around coverage of women’s sports incentivizes the most experienced reporters to cover men’s sports, a conundrum we faced as espnW was coming on line. I was covering the Jets for the NFL group at the time, and I knew that saying yes to espnW might affect compensation over the course of my career.

I said yes anyway.

In the years since, there have been moments where I realize I was right to be wary.

Anecdotally, so many of the talented women who cared about covering women’s sports are in the middle of their careers, and in the middle of a boom in investment in sports, but are underemployed. Fewer outlets providing any coverage at all are still in operation, and many of those are in survival mode. They want to hire the least expensive reporters who can shoot video.

Still, media entities should not be in the habit of perpetuating structural inequities, particularly in an era of tremendous growth in women’s sports. Ratings for women’s college basketball and the WNBA are through the roof. Attendance is up, broadcast packages for women’s leagues are selling for more than ever. Fans are signaling that they have been waiting for this moment.

It’s time for media to catch up.