Pay in sports in USA is primarily market driven. It has nothing to do with how good someone is objectively, because I can make up a sport that I would be best at in the world and I wouldn't get paid anything for playing it.

People through various means ranging from tradition to culture to watchability in bars to whims of a leader settle on a few mainstream sports.

Then, based on a million factors such as how many people watch it in which countries via which medium, whether you can squeeze in commercials during competition, whether there is a "player union" and how much sports-related accessories cost, you get paid a certain amount.

If more people watched WNBA than NBA, WNBA players would probably get paid more than NBA players even though the competition level is higher in NBA.

This is true. Also money inside sport creates excellence. Both the male and female German football team are world class, but the male team consists of multi-millionaires while the women just have a regular job. Below the males are three leagues of professional athletes and some well-paid amateur leagues. Boys are scouted in their early teens and clubs are actively trading them already. Below the first league of women football, there is very little, while they both have to retire in their early thirties often with destroyed knees.

This money effect is also illustrated nicely by the US teams. Here the women are better than men relative to their competition, because for men there is more money in the other football (about which I know nothing, but have heard that there are some positions that need similar skills) so why would they choose otherwise if they did not plan to live or are already living in Europe?

> Both the male and female German football team are world class, but the male team consists of multi-millionaires while the women just have a regular job. Below the males are three leagues of professional athletes and some well-paid amateur leagues. Boys are scouted in their early teens and clubs are actively trading them already. Below the first league of women football, there is very little, while they both have to retire in their early thirties often with destroyed knees.

So if I understand you correctly, this means German women have much, much better in sports as a population than their male counterparts? I mean, given that pay and success in sports follow exponential decay (best few get $hitton, next best few get a lot, rest can barely scrape by), it seems that on the women side, there's much less destroyed health and wasted dreams.

As I described you make a few hundred bucks a months playing in an amateur league, playing in the third league (often the second team of big clubs) gets you a living, playing in the second league you can make a better living and playing in the first league, you can earn really nice money, playing for one of the ~5 top clubs you get to be a millionaire if you are one of the best known of these millionaires you get additional money thrown after you, plus you secured your TV career after your real career is over. You are required to fund a children's sport foundation, though.

For women, you can only make a living in the first league. The distribution is the same. There are no college leagues, where people play at a professional level and get very little money. The whole system is organized around clubs. In rural Germany every village, no matter how small it is, has a church, a choir, a volunteer fire department and a football club. Each of them is at least 100 years old (> 500 for church). All social activity revolves around them. There might be alcohol involved.

I agree with most of your comment, and I don't see how it contradicts mine. I'm not saying at all that WNBA players shouldn't be paid more than NBA players because they are less competitive -- just that the "we play the exact same sport, so we should get the same pay" argument for equal pay is incorrect (since the "same sports" are at different competitive levels).

In my opinion, professional sports especially in the USA is largely a matter of entertainment, and pay is determined by how popular they are. For whatever reason, if WNBA is more popular than the NBA and the female athletes get paid more, that's perfectly fine.

if you've ever watched a woman's basketball game they look like they are in slow motion compared to an equivalent men's basketball game. Same is true for olympic sports like snowboard half pipe, etc. The difference is especially obvious side by side.

Some sports not only have a different tempo, but different tactical options. In football women goalkeepers just have a lesser chance to get the ball, because they are smaller, while shooting from a distance has more to do with skill than force.

Height advantages in basketball are notorious.

Or perhaps a more accurate answer is "it's complicated." [0]

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/sports/soccer/usmnt-uswnt-...

But I keep being told that gender is a social construct...

Clearly something must be done to address the winning gap in tennis.