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Abstract

In 2021, the US Supreme Court forced the NCAA to drop its name, image and likeness ban, allowing collegiate athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness rights. Women's basketball's biggest stars have been some of the bigger beneficiaries, profiting off of their attention, media coverage and social media presence to draw in fans, earn significant sums and grow the popularity of their sport. While name, image and likeness rights are undoubtedly a step in the right direction for campus athletic workers on their road to adequate compensation for their athletic labour, they are not a panacea. In this article, I discuss the gig-ified nature of name, image and likeness labour, and examine the intersections of name, image and likeness and gender and feminism, exploring how they might impact women's athletes’ collective power and the sustainable growth of women's sports. Using an intersectional feminist lens attuned to the racial capitalist structuring of elite sport, I explore the potential opportunities, contradictions and unintended consequences that name, image and likeness might bring for women's athletes and women's sports. These include the opportunity to parlay individual players’ success and notoriety into better working conditions for all women's basketball players, the difficulty of finding a middle ground between viewing athletes as simply commodified labour versus demanding additional, ‘off-the-court’ labour from them, and the potential pay disparities and detrimental narratives that could arise if women athletes’ success is determined by heterosexist, ‘feminine’ ‘marketability’ criteria, without adequate professional opportunities for all players. I also argue that one's views on these questions depend partially on larger normative questions related to what women's sports and individual athletes should strive for, and what counts as feminism in sport.

Keywords

name image and likeness college sports feminism gender athletic labour basketball

Introduction

In the spring of 2024, if you asked the average North American sports fan to name a college basketball player, the first name that would likely come to mind is Caitlin Clark. The next might be Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, or Juju Watkins. Unless you happen to be speaking to a long-time fan of men's college basketball, the first men's player named could very well come much later. In the 2023–2024 college basketball season, and I would argue beginning in the 2023 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament, women's college basketball has drawn ahead of the men's game in terms of media coverage and notoriety, its place in the cultural conversation and the fame of its star players (Lucia, 2024; Wolken et al., 2024).

In many ways, this is long overdue. The quality of women's basketball has been growing for years, and with more media coverage and the tendency for the best women's players to stay at their university programmes until they graduate – building continuity and name recognition for fans – there is a clear recipe for success in the women's game. Sport scholars have long argued (Agha and Berri, 2021; Clarkson, 2022) that what women's sports need is more investment and funding – just as men's sports initially did (Agha and Berri, 2021) – to start the investment–media–popularity–revenue cycle. These scholars suggest that increased investment and media coverage bring popularity and thus more revenue to the sport, improving the quality of play and resources these sports possess and thus garnering even more investment and media (Agha and Berri, 2021; Clarkson, 2022; Gomez-Gonzalez, 2024).

While multiple women's sports have shown clear though uneven growth in the last 20 years (McLachlan, 2019), there has been impressive recent growth in women's basketball (Jennings, 2023; Wolken et al., 2024). More specifically, women's college basketball has seen an explosion in players’ ability to earn money off the court, through the NCAA's 2021 (forced) removal of restrictions on athlete's ability to profit off their own name, image and likeness (NIL). In just one example, the much-anticipated Elite Eight game between Louisiana State University (LSU) and Iowa in the 2024 NCAA tournament saw five of the players in the game with shoe sponsorships, with global brands Nike, Adidas, Jordan, Puma and Reebok (DePaula, 2024). On3NIL, a college sports and business website, estimates that 60 women's athletes earned over $100,000 in NIL pay in the 2023–2024 academic year, with 28 of these athletes being women's basketball players. Of the top 10 earners, who each made over $1,000,000 through NIL, eight were women's basketball players, while the other two were gymnasts Livvy Dunne and Sidney Smith (On3 Women's NIL 100, 2024).

NIL contracts are undoubtedly a positive development for all collegiate athletes, especially those whose labour remains uncompensated in revenue-producing sports like football and basketball. However, they are not a panacea for campus athletic workers (Kalman-Lamb and Silva, 2023). While scholars have written about the added potential visibility and opportunity for women's athletes (Jessop and Sabin, 2021), and how NIL sponsorships and attention could help close the visibility gap between men's and women's sports (Cooky, 2021; Jessop and Sabin, 2021), others have noted that this projected equalizing effect hasn’t materialized yet (Boston, 2022). Scholarship has also been mixed with regard to the pressures around stereotypically feminine gender presentation for these athletes (Bruce, 2016). Some note that high-earning women athletes were much more likely than male athletes to post ‘attractive appearance’ content (Wanzer, 2024), while in another interview-based study, women's athletes did not feel pressured by gender or social norms in the maintenance of their personal brands online (Harris and Brison, 2024).

Others have also examined the legalities (Holden et al., 2022; LoMonte and Jones, 2022) and labour relations of NIL labour (Ehrlich et al., 2023), with Ehrlich identifying NIL work as a form of ‘gig’ labour (Ehrlich et al., 2023), and exploring how NIL collectives (Nakos, 2022) can facilitate payments to athletes while still entrenching them into Uber-like labour relationships with boosters and sponsors. NIL collective arrangements – the least labour-intensive type of NIL labour – also disproportionately benefit men's athletes, as an Opendorse report (Pike, 2023) found that 66% of NIL collective payments went to male athletes, while NIL lawyer Jason Belzer (2023) reported that men make up 95% of NIL collective payments.

In this article, I examine the intersections of NIL, gender and feminism, and how they might impact the fight for women's athletes’ collective power in an increasingly gig-ified, atomized economy. Using the case of women's college basketball, I explore what NIL rights mean for women athletes and women's sports through an intersectional feminist lens attuned to the racial capitalist structuring of elite sport. While the ‘granting’ of NIL rights for college athletes is welcome, it nevertheless brings with it several potential opportunities and unintended consequences related to existing inequities that are worthy of discussion. Adding a gender lens to this labour analysis, I also argue that one's views on these questions depend on larger normative questions related to what women's sports should look like and with it, what ‘counts’ as feminism in sport.

NIL: what is it and how has it been used so far

It is a positive development that campus athletic workers (Kalman-Lamb and Silva, 2023) can now benefit from their NIL. However, it is important to be specific about what the NCAA's role in this truly is and was.

First, the NCAA is not ‘granting’ an exceptional opportunity or privilege to campus athletic workers; they are simply removing the prohibition of a right that everyone is presumed to have in any other sphere of life (Holden et al., 2022). All people are able to profit and benefit from their NIL; it is known as the right to publicity (Holden et al., 2022: 10–13). This is why anyone can become an influencer. Before 2021, a non-athlete student at Alabama or Harvard could earn some money outside of their role as a student doing whatever they wanted, whether this was as a brand ambassador or running their own YouTube channel. Campus athletic workers on those same campuses could not. Even as campus athletic workers were making millions of dollars in revenue for their universities, they could not earn a cent from their athletic labour, nor could they profit off their NIL.

It is also important to stress that the decision to remove the draconian provision against NIL rights was not done voluntarily by the NCAA, but was forced by the courts (National Collegiate Athletic Assn. v. Alston, 2021). Framing NIL rights as a privilege endowed by a benevolent NCAA – which the NCAA and its apologists have tried to do – is akin to lauding a government when, after taking away one group's right to vote (or any right), they eventually, after years of public pressure and an eventual court case, finally removed the prohibition that they themselves enacted.

Even more importantly, NIL is not ‘paying the players’, as California's cleverly misnamed Fair Pay to Play Act might imply. Campus athletic workers are still not compensated for their athletic labour, which is what produces the sport commodity spectacle that brings revenue to schools (Kalman-Lamb et al., 2021). While it may not be university executives or shareholders that receive this revenue (like in a traditional exploitative corporate labour relationship), these revenues are used to pay for coaches’ huge salaries, gleaming athletic facilities, and to solicit booster donations and recruit other athletes and non-athlete students (Van Rheenen, 2013; Kalman-Lamb and Silva, 2023).

At its core, NIL does not change this exploitative relationship. Campus athletic workers are still not compensated for the hours of labour they are mandated to perform for their university teams; labour that also potentially stunts their academic performance and potential. Instead, NIL fills the payment void for universities, allowing them to continue not paying their athletes. In fact, NIL demands additional labour from campus athletic workers, though it is at least compensated labour (Ehrlich et al., 2023). Though some might baulk at the notion of posting videos or wearing branded merchandise as labour, that is what it is. Beyond the fact that being an influencer or spokesperson and continually curating one's ‘personal brand’ is not easy, even if an athlete (or anyone) does find their work enjoyable, this does not preclude it from being labour.

NIL and women's athletes

This brings us to the question of what NIL might mean for women's athletes and for women's sports. Looking at women's college basketball, at first glance, the results seem extremely and obviously positive. Top players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers are making money through their personal brands and their exploits on the court (Feinberg, 2024; Lyle, 2024). They are, for many, perfect neoliberal feminists; they have ‘become entrepreneurial agents in control of their own destinies via careful economic, and very much individualized, strategizing’ (Thorpe et al., 2017: 372).

One could also argue that from a more collective perspective, regardless of how it happens, the popularity and self-promotion of top women's basketball players is growing the audience of the sport. Women's college basketball ratings are through the roof, especially for the marquee names and schools (Lucia, 2024). As the 2024 college basketball season ended, many already assumed this could positively impact the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), with the potential for incoming players like Clark, Reese and many others to garner increased attention, fandom and revenue for the league. At the time of this writing (July 2024), these predictions have proven correct – compared to the 2023 season, 2024 viewership across national TV networks ABC, ESPN and CBS has tripled, attendance is up 17% across the league, all-star fan voting has increased by 600%, and WNBAStore.com purchases are up 756% (Steinberg, 2024).

Assuming this continues, more revenue will result in more professional teams (three new teams are already set to join the league by 2026 – in San Francisco, Portland and Toronto) and thus more opportunities for women to compete professionally, as well as higher salaries. From this perspective, even if campus athletic workers remain unpaid by their universities, one could argue that NIL has helped and will continue to help grow the eventual women's sports pie, with even non-star athletes eventually benefiting.

We do, however, need to be careful. Given the vastly different salaries of professional women's and men's basketball players (and similar disparities in sports like soccer, hockey, baseball/softball, etc.), it could be argued that women's athletes are structurally coerced (Fisher, 2013) to self-promote and profit off their NIL to get even close to the earnings of elite male athletes in the same sports. In the current context, women athletes (both collegiate and professional) are in effect expected to perform gig labour, both to profit for themselves and to grow their sports – an expectation that does not exist at the same level for male athletes.

Of course, male athletes also profit from their brand images and names. But because of the growth and development of men's professional leagues (aided and supported by years of consistent investment and media coverage that women's sports have not received), it is often not necessary for male athletes (excluding in some Olympic sports) – even non-star players – to perform this extra gig labour to be properly compensated for their athletic performance. Collective advancement for all women's basketball players must be the goal, as this represents a much more ambitious, and truly intersectional feminist goal (Thorpe et al., 2017) that centres the growth of all women's basketball players, from the stars to those on the bench, and from the ‘marketable’ (a fraught term discussed in depth below) to the less so.

The Caitlin Clark phenomenon

The Caitlin Clark phenomenon will be an important test for how individual player successes can be parlayed into collective growth. Clark's success and media attention has brought women's NCAA basketball to new heights, with a record 24 US million viewers (at peak) tuning into the 2024 finals against South Carolina (O’Donnell, 2024). While Clark is no doubt deserving of considerable praise – she is now the leading scorer in collegiate basketball history, and vaulted her Iowa team to back-to-back National Championship Finals in 2023 and 2024 – the level to which her media attention has dwarfed any other coverage of the sport and its players is nevertheless extreme. For example, ESPN produced an entire ESPN The Magazine issue centred solely around Clark. And after being drafted first overall in the WNBA draft, Clark continues to receive disproportionate coverage, with new stories and ‘debates’ around her performances, treatment by other players, and place in women's basketball cropping up on a nearly daily basis, often from journalists and politicians who until now have never covered women's basketball or women's sports generally (Campbell, 2024). There have been and are currently other fantastic collegiate and professional women's players, and they have received nowhere near this coverage.

There should be no doubt that some of this inflated attention (though not all of it – she is a spectacular player) is due to Clark's ‘All-American’ story; she is a white, heterosexual woman with no tattoos, long, pony-tailed hair and a slim, athletic build, who chose to ‘stay home’ in the Midwest and play for her home state's flagship school. Beyond the racial and sexual politics associated with her stardom, whether and how Clark's stardom and name recognition will be leveraged by women's basketball more broadly is monumental for the sport. While Clark has every right to take advantage of her individual NIL opportunities – and there have been plenty, if the rumoured BIG3 men's basketball league's offer of $5m to play just one 10-game season in the league is any indication (Voepel, 2024) – what is best for her might not be what's best for the growth of the sport more broadly, and for the vast majority of its players. It must also be reiterated that so far, she has fulfilled expectations around growing the sport for the benefit of all, as she has consistently talked about her goal of growing the women's game more broadly (Changing the Game: The Caitlin Clark Effect, 2024), and has brought record levels of attention to the sport.

But suppose Clark (or another women's basketball superstar) had taken this BIG3 offer. The results would be disastrous for women's sports, from both a material and discursive perspective. It would rob the WNBA of a singular star player and the media coverage and fan attention that comes with it, while also reinforcing an idea still held by many sports fans that women's sports are and will always be subordinate to men's sports. And yet, when this rumoured offer was announced, many on social media opined that she should take it, given the huge salary disparity between the offer and current WNBA salaries, which range from $62,300 to $234,900 (Haque, 2023). From a hyper-capitalist, every-person-for-themselves mindset, they may be right. On the other hand, if her stardom is leveraged into higher interest, media coverage and TV ratings for women's basketball in general, and this subsequently turns into a stronger collective bargaining agreement for professional women's players, then this heightened attention on Clark could ultimately benefit all women's basketball players. Fortunately, this is the route she and other stars seem primed to take.

Why should women have to do it all?

If women's athletes are expected to be off-the-court stars as well, this could impact public perception of the sport product and the growth of professional leagues. It could reinforce the idea that women's sports are not enough on their own – they must also be stars off of the field, curate a respectable, fun and polished but also ‘real’ public persona, and sign every autograph and be at every event only (Mogaji, 2022). These are standards we don’t hold men's professional athletes to, as they are more often allowed (both narratively and materially) to be ‘just’ professional athletes.

But this brings up an interesting contradiction. As sport has become increasingly commodified, especially with recent legislative changes legalizing sports gambling across North America, athletes are too often talked about as if they are inanimate, sport-playing robots or objects – assets to be moved around by management, ‘owned’ by fantasy sports managers and bet on by gamblers (Dwyer et al., 2022; Moritz and Zenor, 2022; Sailofsky, 2023). This hyper-commodification means that athletes are paid because of their abilities in their sport, and little to nothing else. While this can have negative impacts like their dehumanization and mistreatment (Billings and Ruihley, 2013; MacPherson and Kerr, 2021), as well as the excusal of their behaviour off the field or court (Sailofsky, 2023), they are also not required to do any gig work or publicity to ‘help grow the game’.

Women's sports should not be seeking to simply copy men's sports, and the complete commodification of athletes is perhaps one of these ways where perhaps women's sports can be better. We can and should still see women's athletes as whole people, rather than only as athletes, while at the same time ensuring that they are paid adequately for their athletic labour (Utych and Fowler, 2021). Perhaps it should matter whether women's athletes (and all athletes) are good citizens and human beings off the court, without making the monetization of their ‘brand’ an integral part of their compensation as athletic workers (Utych and Fowler, 2021).

The heterosexual, ‘feminine’ advantage: is this still feminism?

The contradictions above, as well as how star basketball athletes can and should market themselves and their sport, also bring up fundamental questions about ‘what qualifies as feminist’, who should feminism serve, and the values and importance that should be placed on agency and structure in the choices of women athletes. For many women athletes, sponsorship and branding opportunities in traditional and social media have offered a chance for athletes to express their full selves and provide a glimpse into the full, not-just-sports lives that they live (Lebel et al., 2019). Beyond the material benefits of these kinds of portrayals, some women athletes find strength and a sense of empowerment from their self-presentation and personal branding (Toffoletti and Thorpe, 2018) on social media, even and especially if it doesn’t involve only their athletic prowess. However, it is also important to note that ‘conformity to heteronormative views of attractiveness and femininity has historically been fundamental in garnering celebrity’ (Duffy, 2017: 87; Hawkins-Jedlicka et al., 2023) for women, and this remains true today. While women athletes generally have a wider range of ‘acceptable’ femininity to draw from than other women (Bruce, 2016), and women athletes may be more likely to portray themselves in non-stereotypically feminine ways when they self-present compared to when traditional media presents them (Shreffler et al., 2016), it remains more financially lucrative to present in heteronormative feminine ways.

Others, however, take a different view of this sort of self-presentation work, especially for athletes. Toffoletti and Thorpe (2018) term the work that women athletes do to brand themselves online and in the press as part of the ‘athletic labour of femininity’ (Toffoletti and Thorpe, 2018: 299). This labour has also been termed ‘aesthetic labour’, where ‘all women (and increasing numbers of men)’ must be in a state of constant self-surveillance and curation of their appearance and personal brand, keeping up with the demands of our contemporary attention economy and ‘the endless labour of “curating a visible self” on and offline’ (Elias et al., 2017: 38).

The gendered labour that women athletes undertake ‘successfully invoke(s) postfeminist sentiments of self-making, personal capacity and empowerment and willingly promote(s) a sporty and hetero-sexy, “current” femininity’ (Toffoletti and Thorpe, 2018: 306). Since athletes are seen to be producing these personal brands freely and for themselves, it is bound to postfeminist ideas of women being empowered social actors. However, according to scholars like Toffoletti and Thorpe (2018), this ‘pretty and powerful’ (Bruce, 2016: 361) presentation of heteronormative femininity is a response to structural conditions that still regressively reward this form of femininity. Additionally, this presentation's claim to feminism is actually discursively reliant on ignoring the importance of these structural conditions. Supporters of this type of ‘third-wave feminism’ may frame these self-presentations as those of an agentic, ‘free’ feminist subject, inadvertently missing or dismissing the role of the structural conditions and expectations that make these presentations necessary.

This has not only theoretical, but also practical implications. If branding, sponsorship and social media influencing remain important revenue-generating imperatives for women athletes, the importance of women athletes presenting in heteronormative ways could become even further entrenched. There are also a myriad of other potential harms that can arise for women who are forced to be active on social media, including gambling-related and sexual harassment, online objectification and hate speech, and even issues related to artificial intelligence deepfakes and deepfake pornography.

These expectations of athletes’ self-presentation can be especially problematic in women's basketball, where many of the top players in the WNBA are Black, Queer, do not present in stereotypically heterosexually, often white-coded ‘feminine’ ways (Piedra et al., 2022), and thus do not receive equal coverage and attention (Barnes, 2022). Examining 2020 WNBA season media mentions by ESPN, CBS Sports and Sports Illustrated, Isard and Melton (2021) found Black players were mentioned by media outlets significantly less than white players, even when controlling for player stats. Black players were mentioned an average of 52 times, compared to 118 for white players, and for Black players who presented in more stereotypically ‘masculine’ ways, average mentions dropped to 44. Importantly, women's basketball's young stars seem ready to call out and challenge this sort of unequal attention, as 22-year-old college star Paige Bueckers (who is white) has spoken up multiple times (Sterling, 2021) on the need to focus on and highlight a wider variety of women's basketball players, and more specifically many under-covered Black players. Beyond the material gaps that a reliance on this kind of sponsorship and influencing income could create, this can also inadvertently position women's sports as still-responsive to the heteronormative masculine gaze.

The way forward

As we navigate a period of explosive growth for women's sports, it is imperative we learn from the issues stemming from a white, neoliberal, ‘lean-in’ feminism that privileges an individual's accomplishment within contemporary structures. Rather than fight for some women's ability to rise in the corporate ranks, we should fight for all women to have meaningful opportunities for good salaries, security and benefits. Or to complete the metaphor, we can’t just fight for the Breanna Stewarts, A’ja Wilsons, Caitlin Clarks and Angel Reeses, but for all women's elite and professional athletes.

This is where my urging for caution with NIL emanates from. NIL provides opportunities for gig work, and NIL earnings are only available to the most elite, most ‘marketable’ (a fraught term in the best of times, and even more so with young women) athletes. It does not result in salaries for all members of a team, or a conference or a league, which could also impact team cohesion and athlete (worker) solidarity. NIL reflects the gig-ified, atomization of the contemporary American economy – it privileges a side hustle and ‘getting yours’ over collective action and struggle for the rest of our fellow workers.

Over the next years, the earnings and notoriety of this current crop of women's college basketball players should be parlayed into payment for college athletes and to larger, more well-paid professional leagues with strong collective bargaining agreements. In the 2023 WNBA season, salaries ranged from $62,300 to $234,900 (Haque, 2023), with a total of only 12 teams and 144 roster spots.¹ While the 2020 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) improved to include maternity and housing policies for players, players currently only earn a 50% share of total revenue earned above the league's yearly target, which has not been reached in previous seasons. Functionally, this has meant zero share in revenue (Haque, 2023), compared to the 50% revenue share of all revenue that National Basketball Association players (and other team sport athletes) get. As of now, there are very few opportunities for women's basketball players to earn a living playing in North America.²

Obviously, the growth of women's sports cannot be accomplished solely by its players, but needs the involvement of media, fans and ownership, who must put away their still-lingering sexist biases and continue to invest in women's sports leagues, not just because it is the ‘right thing to do’, but because they represent a true growth and profit-making opportunity.

With the increased attendance and interest in women's basketball, and the WNBA players union's history of successful bargaining, there are hopes that the next CBA will be stronger. The next generation of stars can play an important role in this growth, if they continue on their current path of advocating for all their fellow athletes and building a sustainable women's sports system that can outlast their own careers.

NIL and the growth of women's college basketball have shown us that whether it is in the United States or elsewhere, it is the players who wield the power. So why not think even bigger? Given women basketball players’ burgeoning stardom, why can’t they – along with their teammates and coaches – hold collective ownership of their professional teams? Their performances and personas are what drive attendance, fan attention, media coverage and ultimately revenue. But with this power comes a responsibility to, in the words of Mary Claude Terrell, ‘lift as we climb’. From what we’ve seen so far from women's basketball players, I think they will.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Daniel Sailofsky

Notes

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The privilege to do it all? Exploring the contradictions of name,image and likeness (NIL) rights for women athletes and women's sports