U.S. Women's Soccer Players Win the Equal Pay Fight
On the historic moment and its far-reaching implications
Dear readers,
This week, the sporting world lost one of its most celebrated scribes with the passing of Roger Angell, the essayist and longtime baseball writer for The New Yorker. Angell, who died on Friday at the remarkable age of 101, was not exclusively a sportswriter, but he took sports writing to a place that few before him imagined it could go. His influence on the genre is perhaps impossible to overstate. We would do it a disservice to try to summarize it here, so instead, we’ll simply point you towards this tribute, by The New Yorker’s David Remnick, as well as this one, by The Washington Post’s Tom Boswell and this remembrance from The Athletic’s Lindsay Adler.
Angell is not the subject of our story this week, but we just wanted to take a moment up here at the top to acknowledge his passing and encourage you to spend a few minutes reading his work if you haven’t come across it already. Trust us—it’ll be worth your time.
-Calder & Ian
The Equal Pay Fight in U.S. Soccer Has Been Won. What’s Next?
At long last, the U.S. Soccer Federation has guaranteed its men’s and women’s teams equal pay for equal work. The deal, codified in the federation’s new collective bargaining agreements with the two teams, comes after decades of advocacy and legal action by the federation’s female players, an effort that has picked up momentum in recent years before finally bearing fruit this week.
The new deals guarantee that the men’s and women’s players will operate on “identical economic terms”—meaning all players will be paid the same compensation for games, receive the same bonuses for appearing in international friendly matches, and share equally in the revenue that the federation generates from commercial deals and ticket sales. Most notably, the deal also stipulates that the players will split the millions of dollars of prize money that they earn from big-name tournaments like the World Cup, a condition that had proved a major sticking point in past equal-pay negotiations.
The real driving force behind the change has been the female players themselves, who, despite having had much more success on the field than their male counterparts, have consistently been paid less than the men. In 2000—fresh off a victory at the World Cup—the women’s team boycotted a tournament in Australia to protest unequal pay. In 2016, five female players filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination. Three years later, in 2019, the players raised the legal stakes even further, suing U.S. soccer in federal court for “institutionalized gender discrimination.” The court ultimately rejected their claim, but in February 2022, the players reached a $24 million settlement with U.S. soccer that also secured a promise to equalize pay between the men’s and women’s teams.
U.S. soccer followed through on that promise this week, bringing the decades-long fight to a close. But even as fans and players celebrate the new agreements, it’s worth remembering how exactly this resolution came about.
As a threshold matter, the deal emphatically did not materialize because of the munificence of the U.S. Soccer Federation. For years, the federation has been more than willing to pay its female players less than its male players—despite the obvious unfairness of that arrangement—and it has rebuffed female players’ entreaties and fought their lawsuits at every turn. This time, it acted only under growing public and legal pressure, and any credit it deserves for the new deal is overshadowed by the decades of intransigence it showed leading up to this point.
While legal pressure did play a minor role in forcing U.S. Soccer’s hand, it’s also important to note that the courts did not provide a real remedy for the players, either. In dismissing the players’ gender discrimination lawsuit in 2020, Judge R. Gary Klausner, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, plainly acknowledged that “the female players have been consistently paid less money than their male counterparts” despite the fact that “their performance has been superior to that of the male players.” Yet at the same time, he ruled that there was no legal remedy for this disparity given the structure of the two teams’ old collective bargaining agreements. While Klausner was of course constrained by the letter of the law, his decision does underscore the fact that federal labor law—as written—does not exactly make it easy for female workers to seek redress for gender discrimination and unequal pay.
Ultimately, the players secured a fair deal through the collective bargaining process—which remains the most powerful tool at workers’ disposal for winning concessions from their employers. And in this specific instance, a few different factors were working in the players’ favor in the collective bargaining process.
First and foremost was their sheer persistence with which they prosecuted their case, both in federal courts and in the courts of public opinion. Even though it was ultimately unsuccessful, the players’ federal lawsuit in 2019 sent a clear message to U.S. soccer that the players were prepared to spend significant time and resources litigating their case in the federal judicial system. In addition to creating a significant PR problem for the federation, this decision also introduced a new and important economic consideration for U.S. Soccer. After all, it’s expensive to contest lawsuits of these sorts, and the federation, being a corporation, has a vested interest in avoiding these costs.
Second, the players received a boost from a handful of male players from the men’s bargaining committee who were able to convince their male colleagues that sharing revenue—and, more specifically, the prize money from tournaments—was the right thing to do. As Walker Zimmerman, a defender on the men’s team, told The New York Times, “When we got together as a group, certainly we saw that there was not going to be a way forward without the equalization of prize money… [the process involved] difficult conversations, a lot of listening, a lot of learning.”
To be sure, this substantive show of solidarity was long, long overdue, but the men do deserve at least a little bit of credit for going against their own economic self-interest to do the right thing. If there’s a lesson here, it’s that other male athletes shouldn’t wait so long to do the same.
Finally, the fight for equal pay benefited from the ongoing advocacy of other female athletes, ranging from the NCAA to tennis to the WNBA, who have drawn attention to enduring instances of gender inequality in sports—both economic and otherwise. Collectively, these female athletes have made pay disparities in sports a touchstone of the national conversation about gender inequality, and the USWNT’s bid no doubt was strengthened by the increased public support for pay equity that this effort has generated.
For now, soccer is in the catbird’s seat in terms of gender equality in sports. But with any luck, it will soon simply be the norm.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about. . .
. . . Richard Nixon, diehard Mets fan? “The Secret History of Richard Nixon, Mets Sicko” by Richard Staff in Defector (May 19, 2022).
. . . a mental health crisis among college athletes? “Reeling from suicides, college athletes press NCAA: ‘This is a crisis’” by Molly Hensley-Clancy in The Washington Post (May 19, 2022).
. . . why Brittney Griner and WNBA stars like her ended up in Russia in the first place? “Why did WNBA stars flock to Russia? It wasn’t just the money.” by Amos Barshad in The Washington Post (May 10, 2022).