What Did the US Women’s Soccer Team Teach Us about Pay Equity?
This is another sneak peek into my upcoming pay equity book. Sign-up for the monthly email list to get more posts.
Our family loves good competition. From football to soccer to Mario Party to fantasy leagues, we indulge in it all. The brackets for the World Cup go up on flip charts in our home. We engage with family members across the country to compete in fantasy football and soccer leagues. We even design our family vacations around watching memorable sports matches. Did I mention we love sports?
Some of my favorite sports moments have happened within international games. I remember seeing Mary Lou Retton complete that perfect 10 in the Olympics and the US women’s soccer team win the World Cup on home turf. I love watching international competitions and games mostly because of the connection I feel with the athletes and fans all over the world. The 2018 Women’s World Cup stands out to me because that’s when I started my fandom with the US Women’s National Team for soccer (USWNT). I was so impressed with their performance and teamwork that I vowed to follow them.
It was my love for all things sports that led to my passion for pay equity, too. The USWNT’s fight for equal pay dominated sports conversations for years, and they finally won their lawsuit in 2022. Before we go any further, let’s explore how equal pay is a component of pay equity. As I mentioned in the introduction, equitable pay is found in a system which recognizes that each employee has different resources and opportunities. The employer seeks to understand and provide what people need based on these differences. Some examples here are geographic locations and sector market rates.
Another example is under this umbrella definition of pay equity is equal pay. Equal pay may be defined as everyone has the same opportunities and resources. Let’s use the USWNT to explore this distinction. For years, the women’s team received less money for wins and bonuses for multiple wins and trained in inferior facilities just to play soccer for the USA. Equal pay for them would equate to the same pay as the men’s team and the same level of training facilities and support.
Much of this inequity was driven by television ratings. The United States Soccer Federation (USSF) said that the men’s team brought in more viewers and thus more advertising revenue. Of course, women’s sports have been on the rise for years. And a key way for people to watch women’s sports is the availability of games on channels, which has been lacking for decades. Additionally, the USSF claimed that the women’s team did not “perform equal skill [and] effort" because "the overall soccer-playing ability required to compete at the senior men's national team level is materially influenced by the level of certain physical attributes such as speed and strength” (ESPN, 2022).
Former USWNT player Megan Rapinoe testified to the US Congress in March 2021 saying:
“The United States women’s national team has won four World Cup championships and four Olympic gold medals on behalf of our country. We have filled stadiums, broken viewing records, and sold out jerseys, all popular metrics by which we are judged. Yet despite all of this, we are still paid less than men – for each trophy, of which there are many, each win, each tie, each time we play. Less.”
The focus of this book is U.S.-based nonprofits, and not many of them do not employ athletes. How does this example relate to a nonprofit? Equal pay is more than sports wins. Equal pay can be related to a person’s education, geographic location, or sector market rates. When I first started researching equal pay, I thought the solution was simple. I assumed that companies had secret ranges for men and women. Guess what? It’s not true.
More often than not, our pay systems have inherent bias in the structures, and the bias is much larger than gender. For instance, you may have seen that companies are starting to decrease the number of jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree. Why is that? Do we not need college education in our jobs now? It’s not that the education needs have changed; companies are just now admitting that people can gain the essential skills and knowledge to do complex work in more than one way (bachelor’s degree).
Companies are also recognizing that all people do not have equal access to these education systems. This is just one example of bias built into our pay structures. In this chapter, we will discuss why three specific groups do not experience equal pay and how companies can start closing the gap for these groups.
This is a sneak peek into my new pay equity book, coming 2024. Hope you enjoyed it!
Photo by Chris Leipelt on Unsplash