The U.S. women’s national soccer team is no stranger to winning — yet this week’s victory closing the gender pay gap between the squad and its male counterpart must taste especially sweet. The battle was as hard-fought as any match, and the prize is worth more to all of sports than any trophy.
The U.S. Soccer Federation announced on Wednesday that collective bargaining with the men’s and women’s national teams had resulted in a deal to equalize salaries and bonuses. This final hurrah comes after years of argument between the women’s team and the national governing body, including a lawsuit settled last year for $24 million. During this confrontation, the athlete-employees continued working hard for their employer on the pitch — defeating the globe’s best time and time again with their usual panache. The United States is now the first country to reach equal pay for its men’s and women’s soccer teams. Ideally, it will be far from the last.
That the U.S. women’s soccer team was mistreated from the start shouldn’t come as a surprise; after all, the scourge of gender discrimination extends across professions. This case, however, was especially egregious. At the outset of this dispute, the female players weren’t only making less money than the male players. They were playing more often on artificial turf and flying less often on chartered planes. A previous U.S. Soccer head justified this by allowing his lawyers to argue it was “indisputable science” that women’s soccer was inferior.
These supposedly inferior athletes have won four World Cups while the men’s team has won none. But this didn’t matter when payday rolled around. The Post’s Fact Checker at one point discovered that the disparity in bonus payments between the two teams was so great that the men earned more for losing a World Cup match than the women got for winning one. The usual argument that the revenue brought in ought to determine the reward meted out did not, in this case, hold: Though ticket sales, the biggest generator of match revenue for both teams, have traditionally been lower for the women, they earned $900,000 more than the men between 2016 and 2018: $50.8 million compared with the men’s $49.9 million. In 2016, the year after their third World Cup win, they outplayed the men by $1.9 million.
The injustice visited on the U.S. women’s national soccer team in this case was, in short, as impossible to miss as winger and co-captain Megan Rapinoe’s brightly dyed hair, and it is to the men’s team’s credit that they collaborated with the women to even the pitch at last. But even this battle was difficult, which suggests other battles — whether in soccer, in other sports, or in the manifold other industries still rife with pay disparities — could prove harder still. Those doing the fighting can take some inspiration from the gumption and grit the U.S. women’s squad has unfailingly shown, both on and off the field.
