One of the more exciting storylines of 2024 is the continued growth of women’s sports.
Basketball in particular stands out, with the WNBA reaching record highs for attendance and TV viewership upon the arrival of young stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Clark—who was recently featured on Forbes’ list of the 100 Most Powerful Women—has now earned the No. 13 spot on our ranking of the Highest-Paid Female Athletes 2024.
Usually, this annual list is dominated by tennis players. And while that sport continues to earn women large sums of money—20-year-old Coco Gauff’s estimated $34.4 million gives her one of the best years ever recorded by a female athlete—the mix of sports represented by the top 20 earners is becoming more balanced. This year’s ranking includes three golfers, two basketball players, a soccer player, a gymnast, a freestyle skier and a badminton player.
Another sign of progress: Eleven athletes surpassed $10 million in earnings this year, according to Forbes estimates—the first time there have been more than eight. And together, the 20 highest-paid female athletes earned more than $258 million, a 15% increase over last year’s $226 million.
Yet as promising as those numbers are, the earnings pale in comparison to the top 20 male athletes, who raked in $2.23 billion on Forbes’ list of the 50 highest-paid athletes overall—a list on which no women were featured.
As Forbes’ Brett Knight and Justin Birnbaum write, the discrepancy between men and women’s pay starts with differences in revenues between leagues. But a shift is occurring there as well. The WNBA will reportedly receive $200 million a year as part of the 11-year, $76 billion media rights agreements the NBA signed over the summer—a sixfold increase from the WNBA’s previous deal with ESPN, according to Sportico. And in golf, the LPGA Tour is offering $131 million in purses across its 33 tournaments next year—a 90% increase since 2021.
Read more about the Highest-Paid Female Athletes and the rising tide of money in women’s sports here, and keep reading below for more great sports stories from Forbes. |
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