Thinking about stories like this one, US Soccer’s Wage Gap is America’s Shame (The Guardian), after seeing this video.
Back in the Fall of 2014, Nancy Jianakoplos, presented a related paper (NCAA Basketball: Do Men and Women Play the Same Game?) in our department seminar. I had invited her out—and the women’s basketball team to attend—after seeing her presentation at the Western meetings.
Other related news stories include questions about the difference in “Buzz” during March Madness (on CNN).
There’s more: 538 says Women’s College Basketball is Better Than Men’s.
A number of papers crop up in a Google Scholar search of those related to Jianakoplos’s paper. Particularly Kim McGoldrick and Lisa Voeks’ We Got Game!. Following that paper’s lead on Google Scholar, there’s a paper from Katayama and Nuch that would at first appear relevant to the video above.
Using game-level panel data on the National Basketball Association (NBA), we examine the causal effect of within-team salary dispersion on team performance. We exploit three measures of salary dispersion and examine the effect at three levels: whether the outcome of the game is influenced by salary dispersion among (1) players participating in the current game (active players), (2) players who played more than half of their team’s games in a season (regular and occasional players) and (3) the entire player population. Regardless of the measures used, we find that salary dispersion does not influence team performance.
This leads to an interesting quote in Papps, Bryson, and Gomez.
“The real reason the [Chicago] Bulls won six NBA championships in nine years is that we plugged into the power of oneness instead of the power of one man. Sure, we had Michael Jordan, and you have to credit his talent. But at the other end of the spectrum, if players 9, 10, 11, and 12 are unhappy because Michael takes twenty-five shots a game, their negativity is going to undermine everything. It doesn’t matter how good individual players are — they can’t compete with a team that is awake and aware and trusts each other. People don’t understand that.” Phil Jackson (2004), The Soul of Teamwork.
Yet in thinking about the video we’re interested in inter-team differences. Frick, in a paper on professional distance running reports findings that are
compatible with two other (complementary rather than substitute) hypotheses: due to changing socio-cultural conditions boys and girls are today socialized similarly in many parts of the world and due to the increasing returns to success (i.e. identical prize money levels and distributions) women are nowadays motivated to train as hard as comparably talented men.