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Signs welcoming Indiana Fever's new player Caitlin Clark, at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.
Basketball double whammy: Gender pay gap and betting scandals
It’s been a big week for professional basketball leagues catching heat. Fans were outraged to learn that college basketball legend and all-time NCAA top-scorer and top WNBA draft pick Caitlin Clarkwill earn a meager $338,056 over four years with the Indiana Fever.
That means, Clark’s earnings will be less than 1% of the 2023 NBA top draft pick, Victor Wembanyama’s $55 million deal. It’s even lower – much lower– than some NBA mascots.
Sure, Clark is set to make $3 million in ad deals, but the gender pay gap point remains, particularly as the league continues to grow. The WNBA draws fewer attendees, television viewers, and broadcast rights revenue, which means its players have a weaker collective bargaining agreement. But with a star like Clark – who is already helping set WNBA viewership records – that balance may begin to shift thanks to a one-woman rising tide that will lift other boats.
But Clark’s pay wasn’t the only pro basketball scandal. This week, Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porterwas banned from the NBA after an investigation found him guilty of colluding with sports bettors. He was, according to the ruling, providing information to them and betting on games, including against his own team, and “limiting his own participation in one or more games for betting purposes.”
While Clark’s contract called attention to gender-based pay discrepancies, Porter’s ouster has raised questions about player’s involvement in betting scandals (and sponsorship deals with gaming outlets) – something that has become more common following the 2018 US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down federal laws against betting on professional sports. With a bigger pool of bettors offering more opportunities for such insider betting scandals, could it be time for the legal ban – or at least limits – to rebound?Graphic Truth: Are Canada and the US narrowing the gender pay gap?
Despite lofty rhetoric about equality from politicians in Washington and Ottawa, the US and Canada are trailing behind several of their G7 counterparts (though both far ahead of Japan) when it comes to progress made in narrowing the gender pay gap over the past two decades or so, OECD data shows.
Women working full-time in the US make 84 cents for every dollar men make, according to the Census Bureau. Canadian women make 88 cents for every dollar men make, per the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
Since 2002, the gender wage gap — defined as the difference between median earnings of men and women relative to median earnings of men — has declined in the US from 22.1% to 17%. During the same period in Canada, it declined from 24% to 17.1%.
Are the US and Canada doing enough to narrow the gender pay gap?
A mock 10 baht banknote bearing an illustration of a yellow duck instead of the Thai king or his predecessor is pictured in Bangkok on Nov. 25, 2020.
Hard Numbers: Thai royal canard, Biden’s deficit plan, Japan’s gender pay gap, golden Odin, Greek walkout
2: Prepare to read the next sentence twice. A man in Thailand is facing two years in jail for selling calendars of … rubber ducks. The squeaky fowl has long been a symbol of the country’s pro-democracy movement, and since these birds were dressed in royal regalia, authorities say they insulted the monarchy. The country’s defamation laws have been used to convict 200 people since 2020.
2 trillion: With a partisan battle over the debt ceiling looming, President Joe Biden on Thursday is set to unveil a plan to reduce the federal budget deficit by $2 trillion over the next 10 years. Don’t expect Republicans to jump for joy though – the plan is expected to call for tax increases for the wealthy and corporations but won’t satisfy the GOP’s demands for spending cuts.
75: PM Fumio Kishida vowed yesterday to “work even harder” to tackle the massive gender pay gap in Japan, where women earn 75% of what men do for full-time work. The Land of the Rising Sun has ranked abysmally on the World Economic Forum’s gender parity report despite efforts by successive governments to tackle the issue.
1,500: Historians shouldn’t be too Thor about this. Scientists have uncovered the oldest-known reference to the Norse god Odin on a gold disc dating back 1,500 years. The ornamental pendant is part of a trove of gold found in Denmark in 2020, and its inscription, “He’s Odin’s man,” likely refers to an unknown lord or king.
60,000: At least 60,000 Greeks joined anti-government protests Wednesday, a week after a deadly train crash — blamed on years of underinvestment in infrastructure — killed 57 people. Most protesters were in Athens, where they marched to parliament chanting "murderers” in the biggest challenge to date to PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
US women soccer team’s fight for equal pay "because we're clearly the dominant team"
The World Cup-winning US women's soccer team won its sixth medal (bronze) in the Tokyo Olympics, and it's arguably the world's best squad in recent years. Meanwhile, the national women's team just filed its first brief to appeal an equal pay lawsuit ruling against the US Soccer Federation, one year after a judge rejected their claim that they were underpaid compared to the (way less successful) men's squad. GZERO World gets the latest on what comes next from two-time gold medalist and World Cup champion goalkeeper Briana Scurry and their lawyers.
Watch the episode: Politics, protest & the Olympics: the IOC's Dick Pound
Women have borne the economic brunt of the pandemic
It's no secret that women around the world have shouldered much of the burden brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when it comes to unpaid labor. As London School of Economics director Minouche Shafik points out in this week's episode of GZERO World, on average in the world women do two hours more unpaid work per day than men. And whether we're talking Norway or Pakistan, women have been doing more than their fair share for a long time before COVID hit. So how do women come back from what Shafik calls "the biggest change in the social contract in decades?" That's a major focus of this week's show.
Watch the episode: Is modern society broken?
The pandemic is hurting women more than men
At the outset of the pandemic earlier this year, people in high places said that the coronavirus was shaping up to be the "great equalizer." But, in fact, the twin health and economic effects of the pandemic have been anything but equal. The poor have suffered and died more than the rich. Ethnic minorities in Europe and the US have borne the brunt. Pre-existing inequalities have been exposed, and deepened, by the disease.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the pandemic's disproportionate impact on women. What are the particular challenges for women in this crisis, and what does recovery look like for over half of the world's population?
Health impacts and inequality. One major impact of the lockdowns for millions of women and girls around the world has been to limit their access to reproductive and sexual health services, particularly in developing countries.
The United Nations Population Fund predicts that there could be as many as 7 million unintended pregnancies globally this year because of COVID-related lockdowns, as well as transport and personnel shortages that have made it impossible for many to access abortions and contraception over the past six months.
Consider that in India, for example, almost three quarters of abortions are for medical purposes up to 7 weeks gestation. Indeed, research already shows that millions of Indian and Nepalese women — particularly those living in rural areas — have been impeded from accessing crucial medical care.
This isn't just an issue in the developing world. Even before the pandemic, many women's healthcare needs in America went unmet because of a lack of access. And the issue is even more dire for women of color. Black women in the United States were 2-3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women, while infant mortality rates were also disproportionately high for non-white Americans.
Indeed, unequal access to quality healthcare for women in developed countries like the US and the UK has been further compounded by the pandemic, which has overwhelmed hospitals in many cities and exhausted medical supply chains.
Disproportionate economic pain. Women have suffered disproportionately from COVID-19's economic aftershocks in two key ways.
First, at least 740 million women, 58 percent of the global female labor force, are employed in the "informal economy" — jobs that are not officially registered and therefore are mostly not eligible for benefits or social safety net provisions. (Nearly a fifth of all workers in the US have jobs in the informal sector.) This was the case back in March when the US Congress passed major relief measures — totaling more than $2 trillion — that did not extend adequate support for informal workers.
In low-income countries, meanwhile, a whopping 92 percent of women work in the informal sector. Clearly, the pandemic's economic burden disproportionately falls on women who are more likely to toil in the hard-hit informal and casual sectors.
Second, as a result of longstanding wage inequality and structural biases in recruitment, women were already at a disadvantage securing well-paying jobs and integrating into the workforce. Research shows that women also still shoulder the majority of unpaid domestic care work. That means that in places where schools and daycares were (or are) closed, childcare responsibilities have overwhelmingly fallen on women, preventing them from re-entering the workforce. There's precedent for this, too. Data shows that after the recent Ebola epidemic in Africa (2013-2016), women were disproportionately affected by job losses and took way longer to land steady jobs again after the crisis.
Gender-based violence: the shadow pandemic. While quarantines and lockdowns have helped curb the coronavirus' spread, they have also heightened the danger to women who live with abusive partners or family members.
In Colombia, for example, calls to domestic violence hotlines rose 90 percent after the government first called for mandatory lockdowns this past spring, while the EU said that domestic violence had risen by as much as 30 percent in some countries — a scourge the UN referred to as the "shadow pandemic," and a gross human rights violation.
Many observers fear that recent events will undo years of progress on mitigating gender-based violence, particularly in Latin America where protests against femicide (the killing of women) mobilized thousands of women earlier this year. It's within this context that Clare Wenham, a global-health policy expert, recently told The Atlantic that "the distorting effects of an epidemic can last for years," referring to the challenge of stopping the unraveling of decades of social progress.
Takeaway: Women, a majority of the world's population, are disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Without addressing that aspect of recovery, there cannot, in a meaningful sense, be a real recovery at all.
- The fight for gender equality - GZERO Media ›
- The Graphic Truth: Life is actually getting better - GZERO Media ›
- The pandemic’s impact on women and the global economy - GZERO Media ›
- Why pandemic was "perfect storm" for violence against women: Dr. Okito Wedi - GZERO Media ›
- "Women fell between the cracks" during COVID — former UN Women chief - GZERO Media ›
- The global battle over reproductive rights - GZERO Media ›
- International Women's Day 2021: when women flooded the streets - GZERO Media ›
- Why the pandemic has been worse for women: UN Women's Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka - GZERO Media ›
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