It’s been a huge year for the growth of women’s sports. You’d have to be avoiding the world completely to have missed all of the news about how fast women’s sports are expanding, and how much money is finally being invested into pro leagues. It’s been a long time coming, and with this growth, the athletes who play in women’s leagues have an opportunity to achieve much more financial parity. But do the labour conditions exist for this to actually happen? A look back at the state of labour organizing in women’s sports in 2024 gives us some clues on what we can expect to come next.
If you were to follow the media narrative, you would likely think that this was a big year for the athletes of pro women’s sports leagues. And it was. This year, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) announced that the Toronto Tempo would be joining the league in 2026, alongside a team in Portland, Oregon, making them the next expansion teams following the arrival of the Golden State Valkyries in 2025. Viewership of the WNBA was up 170 percent from last season. The Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) announced that they were adding at least two more teams for their third season in 2025-26.
Brittney Griner’s detainment as a political prisoner in Russia in 2022 brought the dire state of pro women’s athlete salaries—and the safety risk it posed—to public consciousness. Even still, a new report from Parity Now found that 78 percent of pro women’s athletes report making $50,000 or less from their sport, and 50 percent earned no net income after accounting for out-of-pocket expenses related to their sport. Not only that, 74 percent worked a job outside of their athletic career (the National Women’s Soccer League Players’ Association [NWSLPA] literally has a #NoMoreSideHustles campaign). And while there was big labour-related news too—the WNBA players opted out of their collective bargaining agreement (CBA) ahead of the 2025 season, opening the door for negotiations to begin, and the NWSL became the first pro league to eliminate the draft—the general state of labour organizing in women’s sports is “fairly poor,” says David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University.
“They’re fairly weak unions,” Berri says. “But I think it has to be put into context that labour organizing in men’s sports is also fairly poor and extremely weak.” Over the last few decades, men’s leagues have chipped away at many of the gains the players’ unions made in the 1970s and 1980s. And despite recent wins, like minor league baseball players finally unionizing in 2022, earlier this year, the Major League Baseball Players’ Association (MLBPA)—generally considered to be the strongest union in all of sports—was destabilized by a mutiny from within.
Looking at the WNBA, the current CBA was signed in 2020 and was set to expire after the 2027 season; now it will expire after the 2025 season, giving the league and the players a year to hash out new terms. The 2020 CBA was groundbreaking at the time, but no longer makes sense for a league that is growing at the rate the WNBA is. Terri Jackson, the executive director of the Women’s National Basketball Players’ Association (WNBPA), told Sportico that players will be looking to address the salary cap, revenue share, better travel and practice accommodations, expanded retirement benefits and more family-related support and benefits.
With all the momentum coming off the league’s best season, it’s easy to think that players will be coming into negotiations with a lot of leverage, but Berri cautions against being too hopeful. He points out that the WNBA is actually owned by the NBA, so that’s who they will be negotiating with. And if you think about labour organizing as a contest between labour and management, the women are competing in a contest where the management’s had a lot of experience with this type of conflict. Against the men in the NBA, in the last four decades, management is largely undefeated. They’ve won almost every single labour dispute—and that’s what the WNBA is up against.
“There’s a real limit to how far the WNBA players can get on this,” says Berri. “Players want what they’re worth, but they’re not going to get that.” The NBA has been planting the narrative that the WNBA loses money, or that their television deal isn’t worth as much as the NBA’s, so that they have leverage during these kinds of negotiations. Berri predicts that the NBA will increase players’ pay and even though it will be only a small fraction of what those players are worth, it will be called a victory.
Meanwhile, the NWSLPA announced a new CBA this year and it is one of the most radical in North American women’s sports. They became the first league to eliminate the draft, and also secured guaranteed contracts, revenue sharing, workload management and no trades without player consent. There’s a reason why NWSLPA were able to push for these things—the NWSL is competing with European leagues, where players stand to make a lot more money and have a lot more agency. If the league has any hope of convincing players to stay in North America, they have to offer them some of the same benefits as the European clubs. This is to the players’ benefit.
But these are just the largest and most visible leagues—athletes in smaller leagues or less popular sports are still struggling, with very little protection. For example, players in the Texas-based Women’s Professional Fastpitch (WPF) league spoke out on social media after their season about what they said was a breach of contract. According to statements posted by several athletes, players didn’t get compensated for money they signed contracts for, the league had no medical insurance, players didn’t have stable housing during the season and there was no stability in practice fields or weight rooms. Because these players were independent contractors, they had no union, no benefits and no real labour protections to speak of.
And then there’s the World Surfing League (WSL). The WSL has a men’s field and a women’s field, though the men have double the opportunities that the women do (the league has announced an expanded women’s field for 2026). There is no union for the athletes, though there are player reps—one men’s and one women’s. This fall, the WSL released their 2025 schedule and it included a wave pool in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. There is currently only one out athlete on tour, Australian surfer Tyler Wright. Wright wears the Pride flag on her jersey, and her queerness is punishable by death in the UAE. There is no provision in the WSL rulebook that would allow Wright to miss a Championship Tour event for identity-related reasons, and the penalty for missing an event without a doctor’s note is up to $50,000. Not only that, there is a WSL provision that prevents surfers from criticizing the event or the league, the violation of which carries a possible suspension and another $50,000 fine.
Ultimately, pro athletes in women’s leagues both do and don’t have as much collective power as it may seem. But any wins they get will come as a result of banding together.
“You’re entering in a competition where your opponent’s already done this a lot of times, and they already know what game they’re playing,” says Berri. “It’s a lot harder to win now than it was in the past. The men don’t win. I think it’s unrealistic to expect the women are going to win, given that they’re starting from a weaker position because they’re smaller leagues. They don’t have as much bargaining power.”
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