When the Phoenix Mercury take the basketball court today in their quest for a third championship, the focus will be on free throws, pick and rolls, fouls and other fundamentals of the game.

But some say the stage also is set to shine more light on the yawning gender-pay differentials in certain professional sports, especially basketball, created largely by unequal revenue streams.

Pay figures for players in the Women’s National Basketball Association aren’t nearly as transparent as on the men’s side, but the recent salary scale ranged from below $38,000 to around $107,000, with the typical player earning about $72,000.

Those figures, for the 2013 season, have been modified by a new collective-bargaining contract, and the WNBA hasn’t disclosed pay details. But it’s clear that female players earn peanuts compared with their male counterparts in the National Basketball Association, where annual salaries extend to eight figures.

In fact, an analysis by Buzzfeed estimated that 52 NBA players, individually, earn more than all the athletes in the WNBA combined. The women’s league counts 12 teams with 12 players each.

There are solid reasons for such a pay gap — the main one being that the NBA generates a lot more money. TV revenue is much higher, ticket prices are more expensive and attendance dwarfs that at WNBA games. US Airways Arena was only half full last week when the Mercury advanced to the finals by defeating the Minnesota Lynx.

Besides, the WNBA plays only 34 regular-season games, compared with 82 in the NBA.

Dana Hooper, an agent and attorney specializing in sports law at Greenberg Traurig in Phoenix, is seeking to raise awareness of the pay gap. But even she acknowledges there are solid reasons for a discrepancy.

“The women’s game doesn’t fill as many seats in the arena. They don’t sell as many jerseys,” said Hooper, who played intercollegiate basketball at the University of California-Berkeley and now represents some female basketball and soccer players in salary negotiations. “Money doesn’t grow on trees, so you have to come up with the revenue.”

Progress in other sports

That won’t happen anytime soon in basketball, but women have closed the gap considerably in a couple of other sports. The best example is professional tennis, where Grand Slam events offer the same pay (though many lesser tournaments don’t).

The top prize in this month’s U.S. Open in New York is $3 million, for both the male and female winners. Wimbledon paid both the men’s and women’s champions 1.76 million British pounds (about $3 million). You could even make a strong case that female tennis stars are overpaid, given that they play fewer games and sets than the men, with shorter rallies.

Golf provides an example where pay differences exist, though female athletes can do quite well. Martin Kaymer, for example, collected $1.62 million by winning this year’s U.S. Open on the men’s side, while Michelle Wie received $720,000 as the female champion.

Conversely, soccer is a major global sport where critics say glaring differences exist — not just in pay but in playing conditions and perks. Hooper pointed to what some consider the dangerous planned use of artificial-turf surfaces that could invite more injuries for the 2015 World Cup in Canada. Attorneys representing female athletes recently sent soccer’s governing body a letter of complaint.

Given the lack of transparency on the WNBA’s financials — a spokeswoman declined to respond for this article — it’s difficult to tell exactly where pay stands and what shape the league is in. Hooper doesn’t think most teams are profitable, and there’s no question but that franchises are worth only a tiny sliver of what NBA teams fetch, highlighted by this summer’s sale of the Los Angeles Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion.

Here to stay

But there have been signs of progress and permanence. John Eaton, a clinical professor of marketing at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, notes that the WNBA and players union recently inked a collective-bargaining agreement that will extend through 2021. More critical, a new contract with ESPN will keep WNBA games on television through 2022.

Also, Eaton points to a few high-profile endorsement deals featuring WNBA stars, along with rising attendance for a second straight year, with more than 7,600 fans showing up for a typical game. The Mercury, with the league’s best regular-season record, led the league in attendance at nearly 9,200 per game. TV viewership this year rose 28 percent compared with 2013, Forbes reported.

“These are signs of stability and investment,” Eaton said. “It takes time to build a brand. It always does.”

The disparity in pay in professional basketball comes against the backdrop of a gender pay gap in society as a whole. The White House says female full-time employees earn only 77 cents for every dollar that men do, with the differences greater for African-American and Latina women.

“No matter how you evaluate the data, there remains a pay gap — even after factoring in the kind of work people do, or qualifications such as education and experience,” according to the White House statement. “There is good evidence that discrimination contributes to the persistent pay disparity between men and women.”

Arizona got a C grade this month in a study that looked at gender-pay differences in the state and other workplace issues, conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

But others counter that pay differences aren’t nearly so large and are explained not by discrimination but by other factors — namely, that men are less likely to leave the workforce to have children or care for aging parents and thus spend more time building up their careers.

A Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis, for example, pegged the pay gap for salaried workers nationally at 19 cents on the dollar, down from 37 cents in 1979.

Making ends meet

Pay in the WNBA isn’t set entirely by market forces, given the collective-bargaining contracts that specify minimum and maximum salaries and define pay caps that teams can’t exceed. One interesting feature of the new pact negotiated this year is a bonus of up to $50,000 that players can earn by limiting the number of games they play in foreign nations during the off-season.

The bonus is designed partly to keep players from wearing out too soon. The irony behind it is that female basketball athletes often earn more money in places like China and Europe during the off-season, yet they need prominence in the U.S. to get those gigs, Hooper said. WNBA.com even has a roster map, allowing fans to track who’s playing where around the globe.

The fact that female players have multiple jobs is something their male counterparts don’t need to deal with. Yet there was a time when men also earned much less in pro sports and frequently had side jobs to help make ends meet. Given today’s National Football League salaries, that seems ludicrous. But placekicker/lineman Lou Groza sold insurance, defensive end Willie Davis was a teacher and Johnny Unitas, a Super Bowl quarterback, installed flooring.

Hooper acknowledges that the league and players are making progress, but she urges female athletes not to be content with the status quo.

“A lot of individual athletes are saying, ‘OK, I’m female. I feel lucky I can play in the United States and earn a paycheck,’ ” Hooper says. “But why should they be satisfied with a paycheck that is so disparate from the men?”

Reach the reporter at russ.wiles@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8616.