Deshawn+J’s+2015+OpEd+Article

 =Gender Inequality In Professional Sports=

Now there has been a lot of controversy about the inequality of the sexes, with some being clearly true and others just rumors, but the inequality in professional sports isn’t a joke at all and should be taken seriously. At this current time professional sports players earn more than the average income of the american citizen, but it turns out that the differences in salary between professional male and female players are staggering to the point where it’s absurd and should be adjusted to not only to make some sports worth playing at the professional level but also to add financial balance as well. Before my opinion in the change of this issue, here are some examples to the salary differences in many different sports.

Basketball is at the top 5 when it comes to the most popular sports in the world. In America it is the NBA that is advertised by many brands and also has hundreds of millions of dollars more than the WNBA. NBA star, Kobe Bryant, made 30 million in the 2013-2014 season, yet he only played 6 out of the 82 games of the season due to a broken tibia. Only playing 6 six games and spent the rest of the season in rehab, Kobe made 3 times as much money than the whole WNBA salary. The league average for the amount of money per year as of 2012 was 72,000, whereas an NBA league average is 5 million.

Soccer, a popular sport as well, has this kind of problem too, In 2003, after finishing 3rd in the World Cup, the US female team received 25,000 for each player. Doesn't sound so bad until you compare it to the reward for the US male team, who that next year reached the quarter finals and earned 50,000 for each player. It's another example of how so much money is made for the male program and creates a financial gap between the 2 programs.

Let's take a look into one of the less popular sports, Golf. Even in a sport like golf, there are unequal money distributions for each tour that both the PGA and LPGA hosts. For example, the total prize money, to this day for the PGA tour is 256 million dollars! That's a lot of money, and it's also 5 times the amount of the total prize money for the LPGA tour being 50 million.

It is the salary, in this case which has really caught many eyes, and should be seen as something to fix gradually fixed over time. It's not bad to have some diversity in a professional sport, these women are considered "pro" so they should be getting paid like one. Salary balance will help make sure that players will stay interested in that sport and make it worth playing. Being considered a pro, but getting paid fairly low compared to the other association is really discouraging. We need your help, we need people who find this as something to be fixed, to speak up about it, because if this gets any worse, some women sports will cease to exist at the professional level. We already have some sports making small steps into a financial balance but it is ALL sports that should be motivated to this cause, not just a FEW.