What is the Work of Sportsmen and -Women, and (When) Should it be Paid Equally?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Professional sport, like most human activities undertaken for pay, is subject to Article 23(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“Equal Pay for Equal Work”). An athlete’s ’work’ can be variously construed, however, as entertainment/profit generation, athletic performance, or effort. Arguments in support of gender wage parity in professional sport that are based on the former two construals must rely on counterfactual assumptions, given that most audiences and performances of athletes identifying as female do not currently equal those of athletes identifying as male. But philosophical and/or scientific accounts of counterfactual conditionals of the form ’If conditions X obtained, then the entertainment value/performance of female athletes would equal that of male athletes’ remain uncertain. Thinking of athletic work as effort, on the other hand, ties remuneration to a quasi-unobservable quantity, with paradoxical outcomes if varying levels of athletic or social disadvantage are taken into account. Procedural justice considerations, finally, such as equal opportunity do not yield wage equality unless we make similar counterfactual assumptions, or postulate a right to equal remuneration that is based on independent appeals to substantive justice. On either of these approaches, the philosophical case for gender wage equality in professional sport requires strengthening.