WNBA Players Had an Ace Up Their Sleeve in Pay Negotiations: A Nobel Laureate

After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three.

One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.

When Goldin replied via email to Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the players union, “I remember just reading it and screaming,” Jackson said. Goldin had one requirement: She refused to be paid.

This month, the two sides reached a collective bargaining agreement that gave Women’s National Basketball Association players a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.

It isn’t just the biggest pay increase in U.S. league history. It is, as far as Goldin is aware, the biggest increase any union anywhere has ever negotiated.

“It’s astounding,” the 79-year-old Harvard economist said.

Mike Bass, a spokesman who represents both the National Basketball Association and the WNBA, called the deal “transformational.”

“The WNBA community is rightfully celebrating a historic moment of growth, investment and progress for the players, fans and the future of the game,” he said.

Goldin played no sports growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s. But she has deep knowledge of women’s pay: As an economist, she spent years rifling through boxes of surveys and personnel records and tracking down data to document women’s changing role in the workplace.

 
That research has included the role that discrimination plays in pay gaps between men and women. Goldin won her Nobel for advancing understanding of women’s labor-market outcomes.

Goldin earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago economics department in 1972, when few women were in the field. She became the first tenured woman in Harvard’s economics department.

In early 2024, when Jackson approached Goldin, the average NBA player made about $12 million, according to Basketball Reference, a statistics website. The average WNBA player made $118,000—less than one cent on the dollar, as Goldin is quick to point out.

Around that time, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and other young stars would enter the WNBA draft and spur a surge in popularity in the league that continues today.

 
Goldin’s first task was examining players’ average compensation—salaries plus benefits like housing.

She also looked at career length. She and a research assistant scraped roster data going back to the league’s 1997 launch and built what demographers call a “life table.” It’s the same tool that insurance actuaries use to calculate life expectancy, adapted to estimate how long a typical player might expect to play in the WNBA.

The answer: two or three years. In negotiating player benefits, it was important to know that if they kicked in after three years or later, many players wouldn’t receive them.

The foundational piece of revenue for the WNBA is an 11-year media-rights package finalized in summer 2024. The contract with broadcasters will pay the WNBA $2.2 billion over the life of the deal. The NBA’s deal with the same partners is worth about $75 billion, according to a person familiar with the situation.

by Rachel Bachman and Justin Lahart, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Images: Carlin Stiehl/Steph Chambers/Getty