No Women in List of 100 Highest-Paid Athletes

Forbes has released its annual list of top paid athletes, highlighting the monster earnings of superstars across all sports, with boxer Floyd Mayweather topping the list at $375 million. NBA players make up a majority of the list, followed by football and baseball players.

But 2018 was the first time in eight years that not a single woman has been included on the list - not even Serena Williams, one of the most accomplished and well-known athletes in history. She, along with fellow tennis players Maria Sharapova and Li Na, were in the list in recent years.

According to Forbes, Williams most likely lost her spot on the list because she had a baby last year, and therefore was unable to earn as much prize money as she has in past years. She was the top-earning female athlete in 2018 at $18 million, but fell nearly $5 million short of the $22.9 million cutoff for the top 100.

The pay gap in sports has been an especially pressing issue in recent years, as several women’s teams have initiated campaigns advocating for gender pay equity. The US Women’s National Soccer Team has largely led the charge on this front, succeeding in securing a new collective bargaining agreement in 2017 after a year of arguing its case publicly. The women had argued that players for the men’s national team earned far more than they did despite comparable work, NBC News reported.

 Unsolvable Problem

Around the same time, the US Women’s National Hockey Team also reached an agreement with USA Hockey to end a wage dispute.

But, seeing as no women were able to clear the bar to make the Forbes top 100 list this year, the problem is clearly nowhere near solved, female athletes said.

Mayweather, 41, tops sports highest-earners banking a total of $375 million between June 1, 2017 and June 1, 2018, comfortably eclipsing the second-placed figure on the list, football star Lionel Messi, who made $146 million. Real Madrid soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo is third with earnings of $142 million. Irish boxer Conor Anthony McGregor is fourth with $130 million. Brazilian footballer Neymar is fifth on the list with $118 million in earnings, his salary boosted by his record-breaking transfer from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain last year.

NBA icon LeBron James is the highest-paid basketball player to feature on the list, coming in at sixth with total earnings of $112 million, just ahead of men’s tennis king Roger Federer, who earned $102 million.