‘It’s just math’: How a Nobel Prize-winning economist proved WNBA players weren’t paid fairly and got them a 400% raise. Use her tricks for yourself

After a years-long public campaign and countless hours of tense negotiations, the WNBA players' association has agreed to a historic collective agreement with the league.

Players will see an approximately 400% raise and a higher share of the league's revenue. The minimum base salary will go from about $66,000 to $300,000, with an average of around $585,000 and maximum of $1.4 million. The team salary cap will be $7 million, the Associated Press reports (2).

Under the current contract, even superstar rookies like Paige Bueckers make a base salary of under $79,000, less than the U.S. median income. Next year, she'll likely make over a million (3).

The agreement marks the biggest pay increase in American sports history, and possibly the biggest pay bump negotiated by any union, ever.

Cheering them on from the sidelines was an unlikely champion who finally helped their pleas be heard: The 79-year-old Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin.

Crunching the numbers

After Goldin won the Nobel in economics in 2023 for her work studying women's labour market outcomes, she was approached by Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the WNBA players' union. They were getting ready to negotiate a new contract. Could Goldin crunch some numbers and help them make their case?

The economist jumped at the chance, and wouldn't accept payment.

Jackson told the Wall Street Journal that throughout the drawn-out and stressful negotiations, Goldin helped calm players' nerves with a simple mantra: "It's just math."

The economist focused on one key figure: the percentage of league revenue going to players' salary and benefits, keeping in mind that the average WNBA career is only two to three years(4). Under the previous contract, just 9.3% of WNBA revenue went to players. Now, it will be about 20%. Still short of the NBA's 49-51%, but a significant win (5).

Adjusted for factors like game time and length of season, Goldin calculated that the WNBA attracts about a third of the NBA's TV audience and a quarter of its in-person attendance per player, so the average WNBA salary should be roughly a quarter to a third of the average player in the men's league.

But they were earning a "miniscule fraction" of that, Goldin wrote in the New York Times in 2024. The average NBA player's salary then was around $10 million, compared to the WNBA's $127,000. That's 1/80th, not a quarter or a third.

"Nothing can justify this," Goldin wrote (6).

She laid out a convincing argument that the women's pay was not fair even in relative terms — and definitely low considering the massive, and massively lucrative, women's ball renaissance we're in the midst of.

Since 2023, the historically unprofitable WNBA, buoyed by superstars like the Indiana Fever's Caitlin Clark, has been shattering attendance records(7) and raking in cash in the form of expansion fees ($1 billion) and media-rights deals ($2.2-billion over 11 years) (8).

The league's finances aren't fully public, but in 2025, for the first time, it brought in enough to trigger its revenue-sharing agreement with players; distributing $8 million among them (9).

Meanwhile, players kept up the public pressure. At the 2025 WNBA All-Star game, they hit the court for warm-ups wearing T-shirts emblazoned with "Pay us what you owe us."

"We get a very tiny percentage of all the money that's made through the WNBA, which obviously is made through the entertainment we provide," Minnesota Lynx star forward Napheesa Collier said at the time. "So we want a fair and reasonable percentage of that (1) (10)."

With Goldin's help, they got it.

Claudia Goldin's key insight

Claudia Goldin has spent more than three decades as a Harvard economics professor studying women in the labour market. Her work helped show how discrimination continues to affect the gender pay gap.

In her 2023 Nobel acceptance speech, she explained her concept of the "quiet revolution" among working women. While the "noisy" revolution of the mid-20th century allowed more women to be financially independent by working outside the home and getting access to credit without a parent or husband's approval, by the 1970s, something else started happening. Women weren't just getting jobs; they were getting good jobs with competitive pay, influence, and potential for advancement.