Two weeks ago, five of the biggest stars on the U.S. Women’s National Team filed a federal complaint on behalf of the team to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, accusing their employer, the U.S. Soccer Federation, of wage discrimination.
Despite their three World Cup titles and immense popularity — tickets to their latest friendly sold out in just 10 minutes — USWNT players are still paid as little as 40 percent of what the men’s team earns, according to USWNT lawyer Jeffrey Kessler.
Now, the team is indicating that it is willing to boycott the upcoming Olympics in Brazil if an agreement isn’t reached within a reasonable time frame.
USWNT co-captain Becky Sauerbrunn told ESPN on Wednesday that if the financial dispute isn’t settled by July, boycotting the Olympics would “still be on the table.”
“We are reserving every right to do so, and we’re leaving every avenue open. And if nothing has changed and we don’t feel real progress has been made, then that is a conversation we are going to have,” she said. Notably, players’ union general council Rich Nichols told The Guardian that it’s unlikely the USWNT and USSF will come to a full agreement on new terms in time for Rio.
Carli Lloyd also highlighted the team’s solidarity and willingness to strike in a New York Times op-ed on Sunday.
“Two years ago, before the Algarve Cup, an important annual tournament in Portugal, we considered going on strike over these issues, but we weren’t completely united then and wound up backing down,” she wrote. “We are not backing down anymore.”
The women’s soccer team has been fighting to get better pay for years, but as Lloyd lays out in her op-ed, the federation has been hesitant to increase compensation, despite the fact that they are now bringing in significant revenue.
The United States women’s national team is the most successful team in the history of U.S. Soccer. We’ve won three World Cups and will try to win our fifth Olympic gold medal this summer in Brazil. When we captured the Women’s World Cup title in Canada in July, we drew the highest American television rating for soccer in history and, according to a financial report published by U.S. Soccer last month, helped generate $17.7 million in profit for the federation.
Yet even though U.S. Soccer’s financials confirm that we are the driving force that generates a majority of the revenue for the federation, when we as a team presented our proposal for increased compensation in our new collective bargaining agreement, U.S. Soccer told us, on more than one occasion, that our proposal was not rational. Essentially, the federation said that it had a certain sum of money set aside for the women’s team and that our proposal was unacceptable.
Looking at the individual numbers, the differences between what the men and women make is stark.
Every year, the USMNT and USWNT both play a minimum of 20 friendly matches. The top five players on the men’s team make an average of $406,000 from those games, compared to $72,000 for the top five women. If the USMNT won the World Cup, each member of the team would get a $390,000 bonus. The women only got a $75,000 bonus for winning the World Cup last year. Men get $69,000 for making the World Cup roster, while women get $15,000 for making the World Cup team. Men also get $1.50 per ticket sold to home friendlies, while the women get $1.20.
The discrepancy even trickles down to off-field payments. Men get $3,750 for appearance fees, whereas women only get $3,000. When travelling internationally, men get $75 per day for expenses, while women get $60. “Maybe they figure that women are smaller and thus eat less,” Lloyd wrote.
Equal work deserves equal pay. It's a simple concept, never stop asking why it's not simply done. #EqualPayDay
— Becky Sauerbrunn (@beckysauerbrunn) April 12, 2016
But money isn’t the only problem the USWNT has with its treatment. The team is also relegated to turf fields, which is far more dangerous for players to play on than grass. Their wildly successful World Cup Victory tour was played on eight turf fields and only two grass fields, and one match had to be cancelled because the turf conditions were so dangerous. The team is also currently in a court battle with USSF over the validity of their collective bargaining agreement.
The dispute between the women’s team and their federation has reached a point where it’s more about respect than anything else. The USWNT knows it is still fighting against an international federation, FIFA, that is rife with sexism and a culture that values men’s sports more than women’s sports as a general rule. But they’re proved their worth, time and again, and taking a stand for what they believe is right — even if it involves missing a chance to play in the Olympics.
“The message they’ve been putting out by paying us drastically less than men is that they don’t value our contributions to the game or the federation as much as the men,” Sauerbrunn said.
“I would say that in the past we’ve been fighting a very large cultural bias when it comes to women in sports, and i think it’s unfair to use the past to justify the present and the future and how you treat people. Just because we weren’t generating as much money then doesn’t mean we can’t now. We proved in these last financials that we can absolutely generate them money, so why wouldn’t they want to invest in us, the asset that’s making them money?”