Name: Here’s How the WNBA Plans to Address the Pay Gap
Uploaded: 2016-04-14
Duration: 2 min 17 s
Description: WNBA President Lisa Borders explains.

Players get paid a lot more in Europe to play and you've at least one instance of someone sitting out of full season at the request of her European team and the reason being she is making so much money. What do you plan to do to address that or to address the pay gap there. So, we need to grow the league, we need to grow the top line revenue like any business to have it pay all of these expenses and have it be very competitive at every level. You have to grow the business and make sure that it is not only stable but it is sustainable. So we play three, four months out of the season we don't play the entire year. We did that on purpose when we started 20 years ago so that we wouldn't compete with another sport. The arenas were available and it made perfect sense. So we're looking at everything. This is my seventh day on the job. So we had the opportunity to address Every aspect of the league. But we certainly wanna celebrate what has been accomplished after 20 years. Would you like to see a day where those salaries are equal to what they're getting in Europe? Of course! We would love to see salaries be as high as they can possibly be, but we have to grow our business in a very incremental, organic sort of way. You don't wanna just hit a spike and have that fall back down and have it not be sustained over time. So incremental growth is much more stable, we believe. It's not just basketball, it's all sports. I mean it really dwarfs the [ UNKNOWN ] in the business world, by a lot. And obviously some of that has to do with ratings. But what do you think long term can be done to help even that out in the world of sports? So exposure to the sports making sure that people understand the athleticism is the same. Whether it's a male or a female athlete and what it takes to get to the top of your game. In business we always talk about having mentors, and having people sponsor you inside an organization. The same thing, I think, is gonna be true for women's sports. Men today, Kevin Durant, for instance, in the NBA Sits courtside and tweets about the game and cheers for our players. We need more of that, right? The same thing happens in business so there's no shame in our game. We would love to see our peer athletes supporting one another both ways, quite frankly. [ SOUND ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]