Highest Paid Athletes: Men vs. Women

Recently, I was reading news about David Beckham being the second richest athlete in the world, and I got interested who else is in the list of top paid athletes. After a little research through Google, I found a good article on Forbes website. Topping the list is golf sensation Tiger Woods, who banked $115 million over the 12-month period. By comparison, the top-earning female athlete, tennis' Maria Sharapova, took in only $26 million during the same period. The difference is huge, and this kind of reflects back to our class discussion about how popular male sports is with all the media coverage and sponsors, while female sports get only a very small part of that. Second on the male athletes list is David Beckham with $50 million as I already mentioned, and the third is Michael Jordan with $45 million. Second and third in female athletes list are Williams sisters: Serena Williams with $14 million, Venus Williams with $13 million. Again, the difference is huge, and it was very interesting to see only tennis and golf players in top ten highest paid female athletes list, with only one female racer. In comparison, even though the male athletes’ list started off with a Golf player, and there is a total of two Golf and one Tennis players, majority of the highest paid males are in Basketball or in Soccer. This fact supports the theory that Golf and Tennis has been viewed as an “ok” sports for females throughout the history. I have to admit that, as I was going through the highest paid female athletes list, I didn’t know anyone except Maria Sharapova, and Serena Williams, and I’ve learned about Serena Williams first time in this (KIN 338) class. However, I knew all male athletes on from the list for a long time. As a quote from the article says “women's basketball and soccer are still a long way from producing the next LeBron James or David Beckham.” Will women's team-sport athletes ever catch up to men? Probably not any time soon, given the lack of depth that's tied to a shorter history of organization and development.

- Rauf Mammadov