WNBA Players Had an Ace Up Their Sleeve in Pay Negotiations: A Nobel Laureate

So Angel Reese and the other thugs in the WNBA will kick the crap out of Ms Goldin after they get done fouling the sheet out of Caitlin Clark?

In case you're wondering how things looked after Caitlin entered the picture.. 2025 figures aren't yet available. BTW the average players salary in the NBA was $11.9 million during the 24/25 season.

WNBA Players Had an Ace Up Their Sleeve in Pay Negotiations: A Nobel Laureate

Harvard economist Claudia Goldin helped WNBA players win a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.

By Rachel Bachman and Justin Lahart, WSJ

March 29, 2026 12:00 pm ET

Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin advised the WNBA players union, leading to a new labor deal with a nearly 400% player-pay raise.

After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three.

One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.

When Goldin replied via email to Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the players union, “I remember just reading it and screaming,” Jackson said. Goldin had one requirement: She refused to be paid.

This month, the two sides reached a collective bargaining agreement that gave Women’s National Basketball Association players a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.

It isn’t just the biggest pay increase in U.S. league history. It is, as far as Goldin is aware, the biggest increase any union anywhere has ever negotiated.

“It’s astounding,” the 79-year-old Harvard economist said.

Mike Bass, a spokesman who represents both the National Basketball Association and the WNBA, called the deal “transformational.”

“The WNBA community is rightfully celebrating a historic moment of growth, investment and progress for the players, fans and the future of the game,” he said.

Goldin played no sports growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s. But she has deep knowledge of women’s pay: As an economist, she spent years rifling through boxes of surveys and personnel records and tracking down data to document women’s changing role in the workplace.

That research has included the role that discrimination plays in pay gaps between men and women. Goldin won her Nobel for advancing understanding of women’s labor-market outcomes.

Goldin earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago economics department in 1972, when few women were in the field. She became the first tenured woman in Harvard’s economics department.

In early 2024, when Jackson approached Goldin, the average NBA player made about $12 million, according to Basketball Reference, a statistics website. The average WNBA player made $118,000—less than one cent on the dollar, as Goldin is quick to point out.

Around that time, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and other young stars would enter the WNBA draft and spur a surge in popularity in the league that continues today.

Nneka Ogwumike of the Seattle Storm ready to shoot the basketball as another team’s player tries to block it.

WNBA players got the largest pay increase in U.S. league history. Michael Reaves/Getty

Caitlin Clark wearing a black T-shirt with white letting saying “Pay Us What You Owe Us.”

The Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark last year. Steph Chambers/Getty

Goldin’s first task was examining players’ average compensation—salaries plus benefits like housing.

She also looked at career length. She and a research assistant scraped roster data going back to the league’s 1997 launch and built what demographers call a “life table.” It’s the same tool that insurance actuaries use to calculate life expectancy, adapted to estimate how long a typical player might expect to play in the WNBA.

The answer: two or three years. In negotiating player benefits, it was important to know that if they kicked in after three years or later, many players wouldn’t receive them.

The foundational piece of revenue for the WNBA is an 11-year media-rights package finalized in summer 2024. The contract with broadcasters will pay the WNBA $2.2 billion over the life of the deal. The NBA’s deal with the same partners is worth about $75 billion, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Goldin believes that TV deal should have been worth more for the WNBA, especially given the W’s increase in recent years in attendance and viewership. The league spokesman sharply disagreed with that notion.

“The WNBA secured the most valuable media-rights deal in the history of women’s sports, and any claim that the league was ‘shortchanged’ is categorically false and not grounded in the realities of the marketplace,” Bass said. “The value of these rights is ultimately determined by what buyers are willing to pay, and the deals we’ve reached reflect that reality.”

That deal included a clause that would allow the fast-growing WNBA to negotiate for a higher rights fee after three years.

More recently, as the pay negotiations stretched on, Goldin said she stayed focused not on the countless separate points in the typical lengthy labor deal but on one central equation: the fraction of league revenue going to players’ salary and benefits.

Goldin’s calculations had a calming effect on the players, said Jackson, the union’s executive director.

“Each time we were just fighting and resisting and so upset with the league’s response or lack of response, and she’d say, ‘It’s just math,’” Jackson said.

As for the other two invitations that Goldin accepted after her Nobel? One was appearing on NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”

The third invitation she accepted was also sports-related: throwing out the ceremonial pitch at a Red Sox game—despite the fact that she grew up rooting for the Yankees. “Well, I’m here,” explained Goldin, who has taught at Harvard for more than three decades.

Claudia Goldin throwing a ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game.

Claudia Goldin at a Red Sox-Yankees game in 2024. Michael Dwyer/AP

She practiced for weeks ahead of the game—which turned out to be against the Yankees. Then she donned a Red Sox jersey and wowed the crowd by throwing a strike.

“You’re passing by hundreds, thousands of people, and they’re all cheering you on,” she said. “That’s bigger than getting the Nobel.”