The overseas pay as Kat0189 says can be very sketchy - leagues and teams have folded mid-season, players have had to threaten withholding services to get overdue checks and in some cases have just left the teams, injured players have been cut adrift with no pay, etc. A player like Kaili who starred in a pretty low level Greek league for a number of years was probably being paid in the 50-100K range, Gardler played a few years in a low level Scandinavian league and was probably making less. There was one Uconn player who played in Ireland for part of a year trying to get back to health I believe. A lot of the overseas leagues are not dissimilar to semi-pro leagues in this country - subsistence living for a chance to continue playing. And I think a lot of players (Gardler for example) see it as a fun experience after college and before the 'real world' closes in and they have to get down to an actual career plan.
Very few players are making really serious money, and no one is likely to make more in their career than some male stars make in their rookie deals. Bird and Taurasi hit the peak period of WBB foreign pay, Taurasi may now in fact be making less than her top pay a few years out of college when there was a competition between a few fabulously wealthy Russians to see who could build the best team. The asians have gotten seriously involved in the market for USA players, offer generally shorter seasons with fewer post season tournaments, but I think also a little less money than the Europeans. But the players also get actual breaks because of the shorter seasons rather than going from European tournament to WNBA training camp, and WNBA tournament to European season.
On Edit - Bird with I believe a Israeli passport and Taurasi with an Italian one were highly sought after because they did not count against various league restrictions on 'non-european' players per team - it raised their market value significantly.
