Money, Power, Respect

What the World of Sports Tells Us About the Importance of Women's Ownership

Hello, everyone! I’m back—and now have a high school graduate in the house! It’s been a season full of transitions and reflection for me, so I’m happy to return to writing Comes Now.

This week’s issue was inspired by reading Macaela MacKenzie’s book Money Power Respect: How Women in Sports Are Shaping the Future of Feminism . The book is a compelling discussion of how women’s sports have contributed and are continuing to contribute to the growth of feminism in many spheres. My favorite part was Part II, about power. For this newsletter, I want to focus specifically on the book’s discussion of the power of ownership—and why that is so relevant to women lawyers.

One of the key themes of the book is how difficult it has been—and continues to be—to get resources invested in women’s sports. MacKenzie repeatedly illustrates how this failure creates a Catch-22. Investors won’t devote resources to women’s sports on the basis that the investment doesn’t pay sufficient dividends. But the investment doesn’t pay sufficient dividends because there is insufficient investment.

It turns out that the best solution to this self-fulfilling prophecy is to spend less effort trying to convince men of the value of women’s sports and to instead allow women to invest in themselves by taking ownership in their own teams. This is true not only because ownership is powerful by itself, but because ownership allows women to begin to rewrite the rules of the game. And, once those rules are rewritten to include our own stories, the value proposition of women’s sports is a far easier story to tell.

Let’s dive into this more, and why the story of women’s sports might have something to say about how the legal profession could change.

The Power of Ownership in Women’s Sports

When women athletes complain about the pay disparity between themselves and their male colleagues playing the same sports, the most common refrain is that, because men’s sports bring in more revenue than women’s sports, men deserve to make more money. MacKenzie forcefully refutes this excuse:

Not so fast. “The revenue differences all go back to sexism,” says David Berri, a sports economist who specializes in gender issues in sports. As we’ll see throughout this book, women’s sports are shortchanged in almost every way possible—women athletes receive fewer opportunities to play, fewer resources to play with, and few chances to reach potential fans through media coverage. “When you’re talking about equal pay in women’s sports, the answer is always, ‘But the revenue!’ And my response is always, ‘But the investments!’” says [Becca] Roux.

The most fundamental flaw in the men-generate-more-money-so-they-should-make-more-money argument is that men have had decades to develop, grow fan bases, and build up multi-million-dollar revenue streams, while women’s sports are just getting started.

pp.34-35. (Roux is the executive director for the US Women’s Soccer National Team Players Association.)

Of course, the investment gap is also hard to see. We never see start-ups that don’t get funded or the women who don’t receive support. Instead, those women vanish from the workplace entirely, or simply never make it to the highest echelons. In addition, because decisions not to invest in women’s sports tend to be the result of thousands of micro-decisions made behind closed doors, we can’t point to more dramatic visible differences like the disparity between the starting salaries of Caitlin Clark and male rookies in the NBA or other sports. The invisibility of the investment gap is why the NCAA didn’t make changes to its investments in women’s basketball until an independent investigation conducted by Kaplan, Hecker & Fink LLP revealed that the NCAA was potentially leaving $100 million on the table.

MacKenzie highlights that numbers estimating how much the NCAA and professional sports leagues have lost in revenue by failing to invest in women’s sports is understated. That’s because, as she quotes Shelley Pisarra, the executive vice president of global insights at Wasserman, as saying, “The world we live in has been marketed, measured and monetized against men’s sports. But women’s sports aren’t just a smaller, younger version of men’s sports, they are entirely new and therefore call for new ways to conceptualize value.” (p.63) The lost revenue numbers assume that women’s leagues will make money exactly as men have done, but we’ve learned that, in many cases, women’s leagues have found new ways to generate revenue.

But while it’s important to document disparities in investment between men’s and women’s sports, MacKenzie makes clear in Chapter 7 of the book that we’re unlikely to make significant progress by convincing men to invest in women’s sports. As she puts it, “As long as any marginalized group is reliant on others to give them power, they’ll be vulnerable to having it snatched away.” p.176. Or, as Missy Park, the owner of Title Nine, is quoted in the book as saying: “I don’t believe in ‘empowering’ women. . . I hate that effing word. I believe in women in power. Because if someone can empower me, they can easily disempower me.” Put plainly, to truly have power, women need to own their own businesses, their own firms, their own talent, and their own likenesses.

MacKenzie doesn’t just talk about accumulating power for its own sake. According to her, having power is essential to changing the rules of the game. As an example, she talks about how US Soccer discounted the value of NIL (name-identity-likeness) rights of women athletes, ultimately surrendering them in negotiations with its women players. When women got those rights, they were able to capitalize on them in ways never imagined by their male counterparts. Doing so destabilized the age-old power dynamic in the sports world—taking power from powerful sponsors like Nike and Adidas and giving it to the female athletes themselves.

Ultimately, ownership allows women to make transformational—rather than incremental—change. MacKenzie tells us about when the National Women’s Soccer League welcomed Angel City FC, a majority-woman-owned Los Angeles-based team. The founders of the team went out to potential investors with a valuation that was multiple times what the league thought the team was worth and, after building a portfolio of lucrative jersey sponsorships, got what they wanted. They then pioneered multiple new ways of treating their women athletes, including a state-of-the-art practice facility with on-site daycare, granted their players the right to own a piece of the team’s success, and paid their players for the use of their image and likeness. Again, these were all things that leagues owned by men had not previously attempted.

Ownership for Women Lawyers

As we’ve discussed before many times in this newsletter, like women athletes, women lawyers experience far less ownership than their male peers. In 2020, women were only 12% of managing partners. Law360 [paywall] reported last year that the proportion of women holding top leadership jobs in large law firms was at 18% at the time of the report, and just 24.9% of women were equity partners. McKinsey similarly found in its Women in Law Firms report that only 19 percent of equity partners were women, and women were 29% less likely to reach the first level of partnership than were men:

And, while there do not appear to be data on this subject, there are not many women-owned law firms either. There is certainly no basis to believe that there is a greater percentage of women-owned law firms than there are women-owned businesses generally (19.9%).

Like the sports world, women in law suffer from a lack of investment. We receive fewer mentoring opportunities, get limited access to powerful networks, and are often not invited to the rooms where it happens—whether those rooms are lead counsel tables, major transactions, MDL leadership, mediations, panel speakership . . . you name it. While these individual investment failures are largely invisible, collectively they are demoralizing, and deprive us of a sense of power over our own careers.

While we have accumulated lots of data that show the significant gender imbalance in almost every aspect of the law, we’ve only made incremental changes towards gender parity. To make more meaningful change, we need more dramatic shifts. Women lawyers need to have ownership.

We tend to think of the structure of the legal profession as inevitable: because it’s always been this way, it must persist as it is. But what’s revolutionary—and ultimately hopeful—about Money, Power, Respect is that MacKenzie makes a pretty good case that, with the power that comes with ownership, things could be different.

If we had this power, what could we do? If more women were owners, those women would hire more women. Maybe those women would have on-site childcare, embrace hybrid working arrangements, and have absolutely no-tolerance for assholes or sexual harassment. Perhaps those women would embrace compensation models that aren’t based on how long you’ve worked at a firm, or that wouldn’t allow someone who brought in a client decades ago to coast for decades more on the hard work of those below him. Perhaps we would measure value in something other than a billable hour and get rid of the misery that is entering time. Women would no longer be the ones asked to take notes, get coffee, or plan office parties. They would be evaluated on objective criteria that apply equally to men, and no longer told that they were “too assertive” or lacked “executive presence.” We wouldn’t see as much burnout because women would have agency and control over their careers.

Of course not all of these things would happen. It would not be a utopia. But it could be something different.

And I’m not suggesting that getting ownership is simple. In the case of Angel City FC, it took a team of celebrities and other women with deep pockets and imagination to make it happen. But together they accomplished things unlike those who came before them.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of measuring victory by 3 or 4 women in a partnership class of men or cheering the fact that now more than 20% of equity partners are women. That’s not real change. MacKenzie teaches us that ownership is the key to something far more transformational.

After a century of sameness, I’m all for it.

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