Draymond Green has some advice for women athletes fighting for equal pay: stop complaining and take action.
The three-time All Star made the controversial comments during a recent video interview with Kerith Burke, an NBC Sports Bay Area reporter who pressed Green on his previous tweets regarding the gender wage gap within sports. Green insisted he fully supported higher pay for women athletes, but believed they simply weren’t doing enough to achieve that goal.
“I’m really tired of seeing them complain about the lack of pay, because they’re doing themselves a disservice by just complaining,” he said Wednesday. “They’re not laying out steps that they can take to change that. It’s coming off as a complaint because the people that can change it are just going to continue to say, ‘Well, the revenue isn’t there. So if you don’t bring in the revenue, we can’t up your pay.’ They’re going to keep using that, but the reality is, as true as that is, it’s an excuse. Because everyone says, ‘We support women. We support women’s empowerment. We support women in the workplace. We do this for women. We do X for women. Blah, blah, blah. And everyone uses it to their advantage, yet these women are not using these people who are saying these very things to their advantage.”
The comments came just days after Green took to Twitter to address the massive pay gap between NBA and WNBA players. According to NBC Sports, the average WNBA salary is a little less than $100,000, while the average NBA salary is more than $7 million. Green acknowledged that WNBA revenue was just a fraction of what the NBA racked in, but said the latter organization managed to achieve that success by building a platform and telling “individual stories,” which is something he hasn’t seen within the WNBA.
Green then pointed to Phoenix Mercury player Diana Taurasi, suggesting her talent was often overlooked because people didn’t know her story, and therefore had no personal connection with her.
Soccer star Megan Rapinoe responded to Green’s assessment in a series of tweets, arguing that the stories of women athletes are largely ignored due to inequality.
