March 25 marks “Equal Pay Day,” representing “how far” into the new year a woman must work to earn what men did in the previous year. On the surface, this public awareness day seems like a call for fairness. But in reality, it’s part of a broader narrative that portrays women as perpetual victims of circumstance.

The gender pay gap is a statistic that has been misused for decades. It compares average salaries but doesn’t include education levels, professions, experience, hours worked, or the hundreds of factors determining how and why men and women choose to work. As my colleagues at Independent Women explain, by controlling for these factors, the pay gap virtually disappears (Read more: here and here.)

Moreover, this “holiday” always coincides with the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournament, so the disparity between pay in men’s and women’s basketball is a popular anecdote to highlight the issue. 

For example, during the 2021-2022 season, the average NBA player earned about $5.3 million, while the average WNBA player earned around $130,000. WNBA rookies earn less, like No. 1 pick Caitlin Clark, whose base salary was $76,535 for her first year, part of a four-year, $338,056 deal she signed with the Indiana Fever in 2024. 

However, the 2023 NBA No. 1 rookie pick, Victor Wembanyama, signed a four-year contract with the San Antonio Spurs for $55.2 million. Clark’s salary is significantly lower than that of a comparable NBA rookie, but don’t overlook the more than $11 million she made in 2024 in endorsements and brand deals that most rookies likely don’t see.

Pay differences among some professional athletes may be closing as women’s sports gain new viewership and revenue, which feeds into pay. The laws of supply and demand drive basketball ticket prices, player salaries, merch sales, and more. The WNBA saw a massive surge in popularity when Caitlin Clark signed with the Indiana Fever. Fans will pay top dollar to see “The GOAT” play in person, and they’ll watch her on television, too.

Before the 2024 season, no WNBA game had averaged over 1 million viewers since 2008. During Clark’s first professional season, 23, televised WNBA games hit more than seven figures in viewership. She played in all but three of those games. 

“I’m not gonna deny the Caitlin Clark effect,” WNBA Chief Growth Officer Colie Edison told the IndyStar. “And we’ve really seen it most importantly in viewership, you know, our average viewership numbers are over 1.2 million. And so that sort of growth is important because we’re opening the aperture and bringing in new fans. So Caitlin was really a catalyst to bringing in a lot of new fans, as well as our other rookies, who came in through NCAA into this draft. It’s been an amazing draft class to watch.”

In professional women’s soccer, we see a similar outcry for equal pay, but as May Mailman explained several years ago, pay differentials reflect the types of contracts men and women negotiate:

[T]he women’s soccer team compares [U.S. Soccer Federation] to sexist employers who pay female salespeople a lower commission than men, requiring women to sell more to earn more. In those types of cases, the courts have agreed that women were discriminated against. But those cases have no resemblance to the professional soccer context, where the women specifically bargained for guaranteed salaries, severance pay, and healthcare benefits—all things the men don’t have—and rejected a high-risk contract that would have eliminated benefits for the sake of winning bonuses.  

Using women’s sports in an attempt to fit the false narrative of “Equal Pay Day” does women—especially female athletes—a disservice. Focusing on opportunities rather than outcomes emphasizes fairness in access to jobs, promotions, and wages rather than enforcing equal results. 

In a day and age where women’s sports (and spaces) are trying to be infiltrated by biological men, we must demand better.