Little boys get to grow up dreaming of winning the Lombardi trophy or the Stanley Cup, but what can little girls dream of? They want to be successful when they play sports too, but most of the time, they’ve only heard of men’s professional leagues and this can be limiting to what they dream to do through their youth.

As these athletes grow up, they are often provided with the best resources through college and high school, in order for them to move on to the next level in their athletic lives. If this training pays off, some athletes may go on to play in the major leagues. But where do the female athletes go after graduation? They’re good enough to play professionally, but where? All that work can’t just go to waste, can it?
Believe it or not, there are actually a few leagues around the US for women’s professional sports. The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) was founded in 1996, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) was founded in 2012, and, most recently, the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) was founded in March of 2015.

Sources: Examiner.com, Sportsday.com

Although these leagues provide options for women to continue playing, very few provide enough pay for their athletes to live off of. And compared with the salaries of their male counterparts, their paychecks seem like a child’s weekly allowance.

According to the Bloomberg View article “Women’s Hockey Gets a Paycheck,” the average salary for the NWHL is $15,000 versus an average salary of $2.6 million for the NHL. According to the Vice Sports article, “Basketball’s Gender Wage Gap is Even Worse than You Think,” the average salary of a WNBA player is $75,000, which is one of the highest paying women’s leagues. However, $75,000 sounds insignificant compared to the $5.1 million that the average NBA player gets.

Many of these professional female teams are just starting out, while most of the men’s teams have been around for nearly 100 years, so it can not be expected that their starting salaries will jump straight to equal pay. However, if there were more supporters of these leagues, their salaries would most likely rise dramatically.

The amount of fans of women’s and men’s leagues are predominantly different, as, according to the Wikipedia page, “2014 National Women’s Soccer League season,” the average attendance for the NWSL is 4,137 fans per game versus the MLS Soccer.com’s averaged 21,574 MLS fans per game. According to ESPN’s article “Will Gamble on Women’s Hockey League Pay Off?” the NWHL averages only 700 to 800 per game versus the 21,528,192 fans for NHL games, according to the Wikipedia page, “List of National Hockey League attendance figures.”

The lack of appreciation of women’s sports isn’t always due to sexism. Of course, there are always going to be those few people that come up with excuses about why women shouldn’t play in professional leagues, but one of the most prominent causes of this underappreciation is that people have never heard of these leagues, which is likely due to the absence of media coverage.

According to Communication & Sport’s infographic, “‘It’s dude time!’: A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports Televised in News and Highlight Shows,” about 95.5 percent of sports coverage in media is about men’s sports, leaving 2.5 percent for co-ed and a meager two percent for women’s sports. Because of this, a great deal of people haven’t heard about these leagues, even if they are fans of the sport.

One of the only ways for women’s sports to obtain more fan support is to spread the word. Go to games, encourage media coverage, support companies that advertise for women’s leagues. It’s not difficult to support these women’s teams. You can attract more fans and allow for women to have an equal chance in making a living off of sports.