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Professional athletes are distiguished from amateur athletes because they're paid. Women's professional sports leagues are relatively new and most common in very economically developed countries, where investors are available to buy teams, and businesses can afford to sponsor them in exchange for publicity and promotion of their products. Very few governments support professional sports. Throughout the world, most top women athletes are not paid and work full-time or part-time jobs, in addition to their training, practice and competition schedules. When women professional athletes are able to dedicate themselves full-time to developing their skills, they raise the level of play in a sport and create much higher caliber Women's National Team players. National professional leagues give athletes the training and experience necessary for international competition and are prime pool from which Women's National Team players are recruited. The WNBA, for instance, enjoys financial backing via the NBA and supplies a stream of professional players to the USA Basketball WNT.
Women's Professional Teams, Leagues and Competitions
USA
Though women have been pro athletes in the United States, since the early 1900s, paid teams, leagues and athletes are still uncommon and, as of 2006, under-paid. For instance, the WNBA had its first season in 1997, 51 years after inception of the men's NBA. The WNBA (under the NBA Board of Governors) pays the top women players 60 times less than the top men. In 2005, the WNBA team salary cap was $0.673 million. The men's NBA cap was over 60 times higher, at $43.87 million. The WUSA became the first American women's pro soccer league in 2001, but lasted only briefly because of financial sponsorship. Fans enjoyed women's pro soccer for three seasons before executives announced suspension of the league, inspite of the fact that the US Soccer WNT was rated one of the world's top teams. Absence of a women's professional soccer league in the United States now makes it difficult for the Soccer WNT to find new players who are ready for international competition. A 2004 effort to revive the WUSA was launched. But, no word about progress was available as of December 2005.China
England
Ireland
History of Women's Professional Sports
Beginning in the 1970s, a few women gained enough recognition of their athletic talent and social acceptance as role models to earn a living playing sports. Most of these were in the United States. Even now, in the 21st century, most professional women athletes around the world receive very little notariety or pay compared to male athletes. That began to change when Billy Jean King won "the Battle of the Sexes," in 1973 and cracked the glass ceiling on pay for female athletes. Other players, like Martina Navratilova, broke through that ceiling, decreasing the gap between women and men athlete's pay on a regular basis rather than occasionally. Life magazine acknowledged the importance of King's achievement in 1990, by naming her one of the "100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century."
List of Women's Pro Competitions
Football (soccer)
Tennis
Golf
Basketball
Cricket
See also
"Women's professional sports"