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WNBA collective bargaining agreement negotiations lasted dozens of hours per day for four days over the past week, but yielded no contract. The contentious dispute between the WNBPA and the league has become a pressure cooker, with a new deal needed by Monday to avoid disrupting the league calendar.
“We have to get it done by Monday. I should say, we have to get it done without disrupting some part of the fact that we’ve got to run this two-team expansion (draft),” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told reporters Friday. “We’ve got to get expansion going. We’ve got to get free agency going. We’ve got to get the college draft, which is now a month from today.”
The league has enjoyed a recent popularity boom and recently secured a new TV deal with The Walt Disney Company (ESPN), NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video for a combined $2.2 billion over the next 11 years. That’s fueled the most recent, hotly contested push by the players to renegotiate their revenue-sharing percentage with the influx of new cash.
While under the previous CBA, the women’s players collected around 9 percent of the league revenue, the NBA players collected a 50 percent share. It’s a battle other women’s sports know all too well.
Here are brief timelines of WNBA players’ fight for better compensation, as well as the labor landscapes in other women’s sports.
Women’s Basketball
2003: The first salary cap was introduced into the league at $622,000 per team, increasing incrementally per year.
2020: The salary cap jumped 30 percent under a new CBA, but revenue sharing wasn’t triggered due to a lack of ticket sales during COVID-19 shutdowns. Maximum and minimum salaries also increased to just over $200,000 and around $60,000, respectively.
2024: With the influx of popular talents like Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, the 2024 season saw the spark of a viewership boom. By the end of the season, the 2024 WNBA Finals between the New York Liberty and Minnesota Lynx set a viewership record, becoming the most-watched in 25 years. It averaged 1.6 million viewers across ESPN platforms, a 115 percent increase from 2023.
2025: Unrivaled, a 3×3 women’s basketball league co-founded by Lynx forward Napheesa Collier and Liberty forward Breanna Stewart, began in January 2025. They offered a minimum of $100,000 for the short eight-week offseason season, while average salaries reportedly exceeded $220,000 for the following 2025-26 season.
The WNBA broke its single-season attendance record in 2025. As league interest grew, however, so did the tension between the league and the WNBPA, of which Collier is vice president.
After falling out in the semifinals to the Phoenix Mercury, Collier read a letter to the media calling the WNBA brass, led by Engelbert, “the worst leadership in the world,” and accused Engelbert of saying the WNBA players should “be on their knees” regarding the ongoing CBA negotiations. Engelbert responded at her opening press conference for the 2025 WNBA Finals, saying she felt “disheartened” by Collier’s characterization of their private conversations.
The dispute for a new CBA built on vast increases to revenue sharing, as well as the salary cap, goes on. It’s all happening against the backdrop of the WNBA’s upcoming expansion draft for two new franchises set to take place in early April.
Women’s Soccer
2014-15: According to a subsequent lawsuit, the U.S. men’s national team was paid $5.4 million total after losing in the round of 16 during the 2014 World Cup. Meanwhile, the women’s national team, which won the 2015 title, only received $1.7 million total.
2016: The vast pay disparity for a worse performance drove five U.S. women’s national team players (Carli Lloyd, Hope Solo, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn) to file a wage discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the United States Soccer Federation.
2019: There was little progress by 2019, which prompted the EEOC to issue letters allowing several players to sue the federation. On International Women’s Day in 2019, 28 women from the team filed a lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation, claiming it maintains gender discrimination in nearly all facets of its organization and treatment of players. The U.S women would go on to win the 2019 World Cup.
2020: Federation president Carlos Cordeiro resigned amid the ongoing suit, just three days after the federation “argued in legal filings that ‘indisputable science’ proved that the players on its World Cup-winning women’s national team were inferior to men,” according to The New York Times.
2022: The U.S. women won their fight for equal pay in a $24 million settlement with the federation in February 2022. The agreement ensured that the men and women received equal pay for all international friendlies and tournaments, including the World Cup. It also included back-pay damages of around $22 million for the players.
Women’s Tennis
1972: Ilie Năstase of Romania won the 1972 men’s U.S. Open and collected the $25,000 prize. American Billie Jean King, however, won the women’s U.S. Open and took home just $10,000.
1973: King, again one of the favorites, threatened to boycott the tournament, demanding pay equity for both genders.
The U.S. Open obliged, awarding $25,000 to both the men’s and women’s champions. It became the first Grand Slam to offer equal prize money regardless of gender. King lost in the third round of that tournament, but later won the Battle of the Sexes against Bobby Riggs on Sept. 20, 1973, shortly after the tournament.
1996: The Australian Open began offering equal payouts in 1984. However, the tournament reversed course in 1996, citing a lack of interest in women’s matches and subsequently higher ratings in men’s matches.
2001: Reversing course, the Australian Open reinstated its equal prize policy in 2001. Both the men’s champion, Andre Agassi, and the women’s champion, Jennifer Capriati, received the same $440,000 prize that year.
2005: A day before defeating Lindsay Davenport in the Wimbledon Championships final, Venus Williams joined then-WTA chair Larry Scott for a Grand Slam Committee meeting. In it, she lobbied for both the French Open and Wimbledon to fall in line with the Australian Open and the U.S. Open by offering equal prize money to both genders.
By 2006, the French Open obliged, and by 2007, Wimbledon followed suit. The changes made all four Grand Slams equally lucrative for winners.
Women’s Hockey
2017: The entire U.S. women’s national hockey team announced on March 15, 2017, that it was going on strike and would boycott the upcoming world championships in Michigan if USA Hockey didn’t increase wages. The World Championships were set to start on March 31.
Their threat paid off, as on March 28, the governing body agreed to a new four-year deal laden with new benefits and salary increases. Each player earned a $2,000 guaranteed year-round monthly training stipend from the United States Olympic Committee. Among a host of other benefits, they also received travel and insurance provisions equal to what the men’s national team received, according to The New York Times, as well as a pool of prize money to split each year based on performance.
The women would go on to win the 2017 world championship, beating Canada 3-2 in overtime to take home gold.
