Think Progress reports;
The United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) has spent the year since their record-setting World Cup victory celebrating in a unique way: fighting for U.S. Soccer to provide them with the same financial compensation, playing conditions, and travel arrangements as their male counterparts on the men’s side.
This weekend, at a match against South Africa in played on Soldier Field in Chicago, they kicked that fight for equality up a notch — with #EqualPlayEqualPay T-shirts, temporary tattoos, and social media posts.
A few points here via Allysia Finley:
Women on the U.S. national soccer teams [are]...paid differently [than men] because the collective-bargaining agreements they have negotiated emphasize income- and job-security.But it is mostly about marginal revenue product. The greater revenue you generate for a firm (team) the more you get paid.
Finley again:
Men’s soccer is much more popular than women’s soccer world-wide. Historically, men’s soccer has also been a bigger draw in the U.S. Between 2011 and 2015, men played in 53 home games with attendance averaging 35,536. During that period, women played 50 games in the U.S., drawing an average attendance of 16,559. In 2014, when the men’s team was in the World Cup competition, their revenues were roughly four times that of the women’s team.And thus:
The U.S. women’s team received $2 million from the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) for winning the World Cup last year, while the men’s team landed $9 million merely for advancing to the round of 16.If women start to generate more revenue for their respective soccer teams their pay will go up. It could even surpass that of men.
Last year, when the women’s team was competing for the World Cup, their revenues ($23.5 million) beat the men’s team’s ($21 million) for the first time. If that trend continues, their pay will go up regardless of what T-shirts they wear.
-RW
During an outing of my kid's Boy Scouts patrol, two of the parents were talking about the pay disparity between the professional male soccer players and the female soccer players. When one of the parents (these were two fathers, by he way) mentioned the fairness issue in regards to the revenue the female players were bringing in, I jumped in and told them both that the teams are paying the male players more because the male players have many more choices about where they can play, as men's soccer is much more popular, than the female players, and thus the teams are bidding the price of the male soccer players up in order to stay competitive, while the women's socer teams don't have to.
ReplyDeleteThe father who mentioned the fairness issue countered with the fact that women's soccer s becoming increasingly popular, to which I responded "yes, and the moment it becomes just as popular as men's soccer, then the prices for the best women soccer players will be as high as the price for their male counterparts."
The two parents seemed to agree with my display of unassailable logic but I think, in the end, they will ignore it because this is, after all, an emotional issue for most people. Screw logic.
Let's see these ladies put their money where their cleats are and not play until they receive the same pay as the men. I hope they have other skills or they will be adding to the labor pool of the low skilled jobs already diminishing due to minimum wage laws.
ReplyDeleteThey should get a clue form motorsports. As far as I know, other than the WMX (Motocross) there are no top motorsport racing series for only women. Not in F1, MotoGP (and their support classes), IndyCar, MotoAmerica (and their support classes). If females want to race they will compete with the men straight-up.
The top motorcycle road racing series in the USA is MotoAmerica. There are five females that have competed regularly in the 2016 MotoAmerica series. My educated guess is that all of these females spend money to race. But so do most of the males in the “lower” classes that all five women compete in. There are no females in the top Superbike class and the one female that competed in the 2015 Superbike series could not “secure enough sponsorship” for 2016.
If there were no separate league/championship for women soccer the women of the National Team would be worse off than women in motorsports. They couldn’t “buy a ride” to kick a ball around. They would do what the men do in professional soccer; compete for a position on a team. If the women on the USWNT could make the USMNT there would be no women’s team just the USNT, no W or M needed. But they can’t. If they had to compete with the men they would be competing for positions on local team’s not national teams.