Gender pay gap researcher Professor Goldin, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, advisor to the U.S. Women’s Basketball Association, raising the average annual salary by 400%
ėŽė§ íë Claudia Goldin, professor at Harvard University. Reuters Yonhap News
The average annual salary of WNBA players in the U.S. has jumped 400%. The hidden contributor to the salary increase was Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2023.
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on the 29th (local time), Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard University, served as an adviser to the WNBA Association and successfully led the league’s collective bargaining. As a result, the average annual salary of WNBA players has increased by nearly 400%, exceeding $580,000 (about 870 million won).
Professor Goldin, a master of gender pay gap research within the labor market, led the negotiations thoroughly based on data. He analyzed all data since the league’s launch in 1997 and built the same players’ “life tables” used by insurance accountants. As a result of analyzing this, it was found that the average WNBA player activity period was only two to three years. This became a decisive basis for proving that welfare benefits applied “when active for more than three years” are useless to most players.
Professor Goldin used the fact that the “allocation ratio of players to league revenue” was too low as leverage for negotiations. The average annual salary of men’s professional basketball (NBA) players amounted to $12 million, while the average annual salary of WNBA players was only $118,000. Professor Goldin pointed out, “When NBA players make a dollar, WNBA players don’t get a cent.”
Terry Carmichael Jackson, secretary-general of the WNBA Association, said that whenever the players were emotionally enraged due to the difficulties in negotiations, Professor Goldin found composure. “It’s not a matter of emotion, it’s just mathematics,” he said, prompting players to focus on the essential equation of how much the players’ share of the entire league’s revenue is.
The “400% annual salary increase” brought about through these efforts is the largest increase in U.S. professional sports history and, as far as Professor Goldin knows, the highest increase in all union negotiations around the world.
Professor Goldin was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for identifying the root cause of the gender pay gap in the labor market. Professor Goldin is the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, but he is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize alone.
Since winning the Nobel Prize in Economics, numerous organizations and others have received requests for cooperation, but only three have been accepted by Professor Goldin. WNBA Player Association consultation was one of them. Professor Goldin asked the association for only one condition, ‘unpaid’. The other two requests Goldin responded to were the “NPR Quiz Program” and the “Boston Red Sox First pitch.”