(This is called “satire.” Please do not contact us to complain it is “fake news.”)
Princeton, NJ: The NBA says it’s committed to progressive values, but apparently equal pay for equal work isn’t one of them.
Economists at the Institute for Advanced Study have today released their much anticipated, groundbreaking report on wage inequality in professional sports, proving once and for all that gender pay discrimination is alive and well in the United States.
“In every single comparison we made, the male basketball players not only earned more money, even the worst professional male players earned exponentially more than the best women, proving once again that employers are sexist,” said Professor Nerdlebaum Frink, who compared the salaries of over 1000 male and female basketballers.
“Women players are only earning about 1.3 cents for every dollar the male players are making. It’s almost as though these leagues are paying for actual worth — in some kind of weird, monetary sense — without taking into consideration things like equity and fairness, and how a disparity this great makes the whole wage inequality debate look rather absurd!,” lamented Professor Frink.
Politicians were quick to pounce on the study for obvious political gain.
“It’s ridiculous that a male athlete should make more than a woman just because he’s taller, faster, stronger, has longer arms, larger hands, more developed muscles, is more skilled, is overall a much better player, and therefore brings in way more money. If that’s what basketgame rewards, then basketgame is sexist!”, proclaimed Beto O’Rourke to nobody in particular, as he stood on a table in a Waffle House, flailing his bony arms about wildly, desperate for attention.
Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren (one suspects she will have that title for many years to come) also chimed in, demonstrating that, as usual, she was only kind of familiar with the subject: “Men and women basketball players are doing the same job. They’re both lacing up their cleats, and pitching the same balls, into the same box, to win the match for their group by as many goals as possible. And the fact that the sport is played with objects called ‘basket balls’ shows how hostile it is to women! They should call it a ‘basket ovum’!”
On his Twitter page, Bernie Sanders reflexively tweeted that “a corporation as wealthy as the NBA can afford to pay all of its workers at least fifteen dollars per hour!”, which was identical to about twenty other posts on his feed, with only the corporate name changed. When another user retorted that WNBA players do earn more than fifteen dollars per hour, and that wasn’t even the topic in the first place, the Sanders account quickly auto-replied that “Anyone earning that much needs to pay their fair share!”
Not to be outdone, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, having received an alert on her phone that she had gone five minutes without embarrassing herself, rushed face first into the debate by declaring “The NBA and its gun lobbyists in Washington are the reason we have so much gun violence in this country! We need to ban assault weapons! The Second Amendment doesn’t mean you can have a machine gun! I’ve always stood up to the NBA and the rest of the gun lobby and I will continue to do so!”
To Dr. Caterwaul Uvula, a tenured professor of advanced victimhood at Rutgers University who teaches no classes and has authored no serious scholarship, the study was “the strongest evidence yet of a pervasive patriarchy that places a premium on toxic masculinity.” Asked how she could be so certain, the professional indignant replied “Look, real scientists typically start with a theory, then test it, and use the evidence gathered from those tests to reach a conclusion. That’s totally backwards. As social scientists, we start with the conclusion, and use that to prove our evidence. It’s the only way we can guarantee the outcome. And the conclusion we start with here is that we live in a sexist society, which proves that women athletes are not receiving equal pay because of sexism.”
When it was pointed out that there are many fields in which women actually earn more than men, Uvula responded “Obviously, those women are earning more because they bring more value than men. That’s totally different than men earning more than women, which can only be the result of sexism, as we just proved.”
Reached for comment, NBA commissioner Adam Silver referred our call to an unpaid summer intern, who replied “How is this news?”
Note: the preceding post was satire. If you do not have a sense of humor, you should not have read it.
