A Nobel laureate’s assist to women’s basketball pros

In March 2024, Claudia Goldin received an email from leadership at the Women’s National Basketball Players Association. Its executive director hoped the renowned economist would advise the players’ union in negotiating a new contract.

“I’ve turned down many hundreds of requests since I don’t have much time,” replied Goldin, who has been inundated since her 2023 Nobel win. “More important, I turned them down because I would not have learned anything from accepting them. Your request is different. I would learn something interesting.”

In March 2026, the players’ union reached a historic collective bargaining agreement (or CBA) with the WNBA, securing salary increases of nearly 400 percent for its members over the next seven years. Goldin, Samuel W. Morris University Professor and the Henry Lee Professor of Economics, worked for nearly two years to anchor the deliberations in quantitative reality.

Goldin had not been a close follower of women’s basketball. But early on in the process, she saw the players would emerge with big gains.

“I knew the math,” said Goldin, an economic historian who has published on gender pay disparities. “I knew what the players should have been getting.”

The National Basketball Association, founded in the 1940s, is well-established with 30 teams and upwards of 400 active players. The Women’s National Basketball Association, launched in the 1990s, has half the number of teams and fewer than half the number of players. No one ever argued that WNBA compensation should equal what players get in the NBA.

“But it was clear that women’s basketball had become extremely popular and its players were not getting their fair share,” said Goldin, who also holds the title of Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts & Sciences.

In May 2024, Goldin wrote a longer email to union leadership after reading the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of colossal pay discrepancies between NBA and WNBA players. At the time, fans were shocked to learn that University of Iowa star Caitlin Clark, the number-one pick in that year’s WNBA draft, would earn a base salary of $76,535 during her first year with the Indiana Fever.

For comparison, San Antonio Spurs rookie Victor Wembanyama, the top pick in the 2023 NBA draft, received a base of more than $12 million.

Women in the U.S. make approximately 81 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to 2024 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. As Goldin was quick to point out, women in professional hoops brought home less than one cent to every dollar their male counterparts earned that year.

So Goldin, who insisted upon donating her services to the players’ union, applied her skills as a data detective to demystify the relationship between compensation and profits. As she outlined in a commentary for the New York Times last summer, broadcast agreements account for a large share of revenue in professional basketball. The NBA owns about half of the WNBA and negotiated a $77 billion contract in 2024 that gave Disney, NBC, and Amazon Prime Video the rights to show both leagues’ games over the next 11 years.

But news reports show the WNBA was afforded just $2.2 billion, or less than 3 percent, of the proceeds. “The gap in player salaries appears to reflect the highly unequal way that NBA owners divide the leagues’ revenue,” Goldin wrote.

To identify a more equitable split, Goldin analyzed TV viewership and attendance numbers. “What I was trying to do is figure out eyeballs on the screen,” she explained in an interview.

Working with data from 2024, when the WNBA was home to 12 teams, Goldin found the average game attracting 77 percent of the TV audience of a typical NBA matchup. Also considered were the length and number of games played, with the NBA scheduling nearly twice as many tipoffs per season. Goldin’s investigation revealed the WNBA’s cumulative viewership to be about 30 percent, or roughly one-third, of the NBA’s.

Gate revenue is another key source of revenue, with 2024 data showing in-person attendance for the WNBA’s dozen teams totaling about one-tenth of the NBA’s. Adjusted for the fact that the WNBA has fewer players and teams, Goldin’s math showed the women’s league attracting about one-quarter of the attendance per player as the men’s league.

The combined evidence suggested that WNBA salaries should land closer to 25 or 30 cents to every dollar earned in the NBA.

As negotiations continued, Goldin’s math clarified the players’ position. They appeared to gain confidence. At the 2025 WNBA All-Star Game in Indianapolis, they presented as a unified front, warming up in T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Pay Us What You Owe Us.”

Goldin recalled one athlete proclaiming, “I want more commas.”

In the end, Goldin advanced a straightforward equation that deduced player compensation from a better split of league and team revenue. “I kept saying this is very simple math,” Goldin explained with a smile. “It’s just an intercept and a slope; what could be simpler than that?”

The slope predicts total WNBA revenue over the life of the contract, including individual team revenue and a more equitable share of broadcast revenue. That helped union negotiators convince the league that the intercept — or players’ base salary — should land far higher than before.

Superstar veterans like A'ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces now earn salaries with one more comma. The 2026 salary cap is set at $1.4 million, with the average player clearing $600,000 annually. Caitlin Clark, one of the league’s most popular players, has a new base salary around $520,000. The CBA guarantees that players receive 20 percent of a mutually agreed-upon measure of total revenue.

What did Goldin learn from her experience? It was the economist’s first direct encounters with labor negotiations and professional sports. She conferred frequently with a renowned labor economist and “basketball fanatic” who happens to be her husband: Lawrence Katz, Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics. She also traded notes with Judd Cramer, the Harvard lecturer who teaches a sports economics course.

“I also learned that women’s basketball is a magnificently athletic event,” added Goldin, now a fan of the sport who counts New York Liberty’s Ellie the Elephant as her favorite mascot. “This was very much a love story.”