Dr. David Berri
Professor of Economics
Southern Utah University

Public Lecture
Sponsored by the Sports, Society, and Technology Program

Monday, February 17 at 4 pm
Student Success Center Clary Theater
Georgia Institute of Technology
This event is free and open to the public

The gender-wage gap persistently seen in study after study is especially pronounced in professional sports.  For example, an average NBA player is paid $7.6 million while the maximum salary in the WNBA is less than $120,000.  A similar story is told in professional soccer.  The simple explanation for these differences is league revenues.  But the story is not quite that simple. In this talk we will look at not only why the salaries for men are so much higher in absolute terms, but also why men tend to be paid a greater share of league revenue (as in basketball) and more for each game played (as in soccer). Our story will not only touch on the economics of gender and sports today, but also on the history of women in sports. 

Dr. David Berri is a professor of economics at Southern Utah University. He has spent the past two decades researching sports and economics, while publishing works on a variety of topics including the evaluation of players and coaches, competitive balance, the drafting of players, labor disputes, the NCAA, and gender issues in sports. Dr. Berri is the lead author of "The Wages of Wins and Stumbling on Wins" and the recently published "Sports Economics", a textbook from Macmillan Publishers. He has written about sports economics for a number of popular media outlets, including the New York Times, the Atlantic.com, Time.com, Vice Sports and Forbes.com.

For More Information Contact: Dr. Mary McDonald, Homer C. Rice Chair in Sports and Society: mary.mcdonald@hsoc.gatech.edu