The U.S. Women's National Hockey Team, the reigning world champions, recently made a big announcement: they're boycotting the championship tournament as a protest against USA Hockey. Evidently, the women's hockey team believes they don't receive "fair wages and equitable support."

The team's absence will be noticed. According to NPR "they've medaled in all five Olympic Games that featured women's hockey and won the world championships seven times since 2000. (Over the same time frame, the men won two Olympic and two World Championship silvers.) So what exactly do they get paid?

... in the past, USA Hockey paid them $1,000 a month for six months every Olympic cycle, and "virtually nothing" for the other 3 1/2 years. That works out to $1,500 a year. 

Forward Meghan Duggan says it's not fair for USA Hockey to pay them for only six months every four years when they train full time. "It's 365 days a year to be an Olympic athlete," she says. "It's our life, our everything."

The players do receive year-round support directly from the U.S. Olympic Committee — without which, Duggan says, "there would be no financial survival at all."

According to their attorneys, about half of the national team's members hold other jobs to make ends meet, but the men aren't subject to such low salaries:

Players on the men's national team can also play on the NHL — where the minimum salary is more than half a million dollars. The NWHL, meanwhile, recently slashed its salaries, which were $10,000-$26,000 before the pay reduction.

What gives? PJ Media explains:

While fair wages and equal pay for women have been written and rewritten into law since the Equal Pay Act (EPA) of 1963 (most notably again in the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act signed by the Obama administration in 2009), a contradictory Department of Labor study warned against liberal application of the EPA without analyzing the reasons for pay discrepancies.

A summary of the 2007 study states:

Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.

Though some laws indicate that male and female athletes should get paid the same, that doesn't happen... except possibly in tennis. For example, basketball salaries give a good glimpse of the discrepancy:

For the 2015-2016 season, the league minimum salary for the NBA was $525,000. The previous season league minimum for the WNBA? $38,000. Granted, the WNBA regular season is only 34 games compared to the 82-game lineup for the NBA, but even the lowest reported paid player in the NBA makes nearly five times as much as the highest-paid WNBA player. The rationale behind the insane wage discrepancy, even with the season length and game distribution? One conjecture could easily be based on the earning potential of the individual associations. According to an article reported by Newsweek in 2016, the NBA brought in over $5 billion—with Turner Sports and ESPN paying a combined $2.6 billion annually to the NBA for televised game rights. ESPN’s annual commitment to the WNBA? $12 million—less than half a percent of the contract with the NBA.

While it makes sense that female athletes would be upset at the difference, the fact of the matter is this: the public just doesn't care as much about women's sports... That means the teams don't bring in as much money, and no amount of protesting can change that.

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