Trek-Segafredo are progressing ahead of the curve in women's cycling, moving towards wage equality faster than other teams with their announcement that all their riders, excluding new professionals, are paid above the minimum base salary for the men's WorldTour.
As published on the UCI website, men's WorldTour teams are obliged to pay their riders a base wage of €40,045, while the base amount for the Women’s WorldTour are set at €20,000 for this year.
"Salary really depends on the individual but we can confirm that all of our professional road cycling athletes—regardless of gender—make at or above the minimum for the men’s program," Eric Bjorling, Director of Brand Marketing at Trek Bikes was quoted as saying in an .
"As with all neo-pro riders, there is a slightly lower minimum, which is the case for several of the riders on both programs.
"There’s been some talk that pro cycling might require raising the Women’s WorldTour minimum to the same as the men’s and this is something we strongly support. That said, we didn’t want to wait for a mandate, so we made the decision to do this on our own in the fall of 2020. It went into effect January 1, 2021."
The UCI has a planned schedule to increase women's base salary in WorldTour teams to the equivalent of men's ProTeams (commonly known as ProConti) published on the UCI website. The list shows a base salary of €20,000 in 2021 and a jump up to €27,000 (employed) in 2022.
As of 2020, the minimum salary for the men’s WorldTour is €40,045, while the minimum salary for ProTeams is €32,102 per year.
Neo-pros who are on men's teams have a separate base salary figure of €32,400 on WorldTeams and €26,849 on ProTeams per year.
Trek-Segafredo are considered the top women's team at present, winning the UCI Women's WorldTour rankings last season convincingly with the top two riders on points, Lizzie Deignan and Elisa Longo Borghini both signed to two-year deals with the squad.
While the move to up women's salaries is a boost for the case of equality between the men's and women's side of the sport, even within Trek-Segafredo, the wage scale is far from on parity. Vincenzo Nibali on the men's team is rumoured to be on a €3,000,000-a-year deal, an amount that dwarfs any wage in the women's WorldTour.
