Today, the sports world faces a paradox that, although interesting, urgently needs to be addressed. Last year saw a surge of interest in women’s sports—but despite that, many female athletes still aren’t paid as much as their male counterparts.
That “gender play gap” is especially glaring in professional basketball. In 2024, a record 2.4 million people tuned into the WNBA draft. Despite that, top players like Caitlin Clark still earn a rookie season salary amounting to less than $80,000. That’s around the same amount a hotel manager makes in a year.
“Women athletes make 21 times less [on average] than men athletes on the field of play,” Thayer Lavielle, executive vice president of the women’s advocacy group The Collective, explained. In the NBA, men make as much as 108 times more.
Now that we’re well into 2025, however, fans and athletes alike may be wondering if any sports have taken significant steps to bridge the gender pay gap this year. The good news is that some have—and others continue their years-long legacy of upholding pay parity. Here are five such sports where equal pay is currently in play:
Soccer
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Soccer is another sport that’s slowly working to close the gender play gap. CNN reports that, globally, soccer’s professional women players only earn 25 cents for every dollar male soccer players do. Fortunately, more improvements are set to push through under National Women’s Soccer League or NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman. This year, she aims to bring her past experience working for the National Hockey League and National Lacrosse League to further empower the sport’s professional women players.
She’s continuously done so since she was named to the position in 2022, when she began spearheading expansion initiatives that introduced two new teams to the league—Angel City FC and San Diego Wave FC. The teams created a higher level of competition in the NWSL as a whole, which in turn helped it break attendance records. It was also under Berman that the United States Soccer Federation released new contracts that equalized pay between the men’s and women’s national teams. The move came after the women’s national team—for the first time in history—won the last two Women’s World Cups that took place before the contracts were released. Now, America’s female soccer pros earn the same rate of pay as men when it comes to game appearances and tournament victories. Between now and 2026, Berman aims to further champion partnerships that support equal pay while reaching the NWSL’s business goals. To this end, she facilitated a $240 million media rights deal between major broadcasters, cable providers, and streaming platforms in late 2024.
Keep browsing the Girls Soccer Network website for more soccer insights that aim to connect, inspire, and educate.
Poker
Credit: World Poker Tour on Flickr via CC BY-NC 2.0
One of the biggest things that characterize poker as a professional sport is the equal opportunities it provides its players. Because it’s highly skills-based, women can directly compete against men in prestigious tournaments like the World Series of Poker (WSOP) to win the same titles. That’s why we have players like Coren Mitchell, the first overall to win two European Poker Tour main events, and Vanessa Selbst—often called the greatest female poker player of all time—whose nearly $12 million in career winnings currently see her ranked above the likes of Chris Moorman.
Even more women are starting to play competitive poker now that poker pro Ebony Kenney is spearheading an initiative to encourage their participation. Kenney, who currently serves as an ambassador for the top US poker site Americas Cardroom alongside Moorman, ranks 16th on the Women’s All-Time Money List and is the first woman to be selected for the exclusive Coin Rivet Invitational. Combining her expertise as a confidence coach with her experience playing under Americas Cardroom has allowed her to establish the program From Doubts to Dominance: Your Poker Glow-Up 30 Day Series. The program encourages women to overcome their fears and realize their potential in the sport. “As the lone female poker pro, I felt inspired to play the best poker of my life, knowing the further I went, the greater the potential for more impact on other women,” Kenney explained.
Pickleball
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Pickleball is also an old hand at putting equal pay into play. According to some of the sport’s top female athletes—including Irina Tereschenko, who currently has more than 30 professional pickleball medals to her name—that’s primarily because major organizations like Major League Pickleball (MLP) and the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA Tour) make sure mixed doubles play a significant role in top tournaments like the PPA Tour. Similar to poker, featuring mixed doubles allows men and women to compete alongside each other and potentially earn the same payouts. “Some of the female players are arguably better than the male players,” she pointed out. “It doesn’t happen often in other sports.”
Other pros, like Zack Taylor, note that pickleball is also a natural equalizer because it requires strategy as much as it does strength, and that the sport’s tournament formats further encourage men and women to rely on each other in competitive settings. “Mixed doubles is so fun to watch in pickleball because you can really see the team strategy,” Taylor added. As such, many believe the co-dependence required for pickleball fosters greater respect for female athletes, which has motivated a push for equal pay. The MLP and PPA Tour—which merged last year—thus reported that the sport’s women pros earned more than $260,000 in 2024, more than the average WNBA player.
Chess
Chess is another skills-based game-turned-sport that poses opportunities for equal pay. Pay parity is already present at the grandmaster level, as players here are generally paid the same regardless of gender. However, there’s still plenty of room for improvement when it comes to closing the gender play gap in chess. Though many of the top women players who have earned a grandmaster title since 2000 make the same amount of money as their male counterparts, the same cannot be said for those playing at the sport’s entry and intermediate levels. With less than a hundred female grandmasters currently registered with the International Chess Federation—compared to the nearly 2,000 registered men—women also get less exposure during tournaments held at the highest level of the sport. That means less interest is generated for women in chess as a whole, resulting in fewer sponsorship opportunities and chances to play competitively.
That’s why Norway Chess, one of the sport’s most prestigious organizations, established the world’s first all-female super tournament last year. Dubbed the Norway Chess Women, it’s designed to foster “equal opportunities for female players… at every level.” Because it’s a parallel event to Norway Chess’ main tournament, it helps women play using the same formats and potentially win equal amounts of prize money while simultaneously giving them the exposure they need to advance in the sport. Norway Chess’ decision to create the women-only tournament can be seen as a great first step to normalizing equal pay across more of the sport’s competitive events in 2025 and beyond.
Cricket
Credit: Harrias under CC BY-SA 3.0On the other end of the spectrum, cricket is set to become the newest sport to close the gender play gap this year. As far back as September 2024, the ECB—the premier governing body for English cricket—announced that it would standardize minimum starting salaries in domestic cricket across genders in 2025. The new pay levels will apply to both the sport’s “Rookie” and “Senior Pro” levels.
The decision follows the recommendations outlined in a 2023 report from the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket, which revealed that professional female cricket players across England and Wales only earn 20.6% of what their male counterparts make. With male first-class county players earning a minimum salary of roughly £27,500 ($35,582), that means the sport’s women only earn around $7,330. The report also set a target for cricket as a whole to equalize pay across genders by 2030. With the UK playing an influential role in the sport on a global scale, this recent move from the ECB means cricket can realistically reach that goal internationally.
