On Friday, the 2019 Women’s World Cup began. Unsurprisingly, so did the baseless feminist outrage over supposed pay inequities between male and female players.
This victim narrative threatens to overshadow the tournament itself. A ThinkProgress piece, for example, lamented the fact that “sexism has steeped” into the tournament’s very structure, while progressive activist Charlotte Clymer blasted supposed inequities on Twitter. Together, they sum up a sentiment held by many progressive sports fans. And members of the U.S. women’s team have even sued the United States Soccer Federation for sex discrimination due to their alleged pay inequities.
Winner of 2015 Women’s World Cup: gets $2 million from FIFA
Losing a quarterfinal in 2018 Men’s World Cup: $16 million from FIFA
Men’s team gets 8x more prize money for LOSING their quarterfinal this year than a women’s team gets for winning the whole thing.#RUSCRO #ENGvsSWE
— Charlotte Clymer?️? (@cmclymer) July 7, 2018
Of course, it is true that in soccer, like much of professional sports, men and women are not usually paid the same. For instance, the winning team in the men’s World Cup, last held in 2018, received $38 million, while the winner of the 2019 Women’s World Cup will only receive a total of $4 million in cash prizes. Total prize money for all teams involved in the 2018 men’s tournament amounted to $400 million, while the total women’s prize money for 2019 is just $30 million.
But this isn’t evidence of deeply-ingrained sexism. It’s a reflection of the relative commercial status of men’s and women’s soccer, and each one’s ability to draw a consistent audience. This is the core factor driving merit-based compensation in the entertainment industry. When judged on their merits, the Women’s World Cup teams don’t deserve to be paid as much as their male counterparts.
People don’t want to hear this, but the women’s teams are simply not nearly as good as all-male teams. They can be exciting, and rooting for them is equally patriotic, but the market has spoken quite loudly on this topic (more in Europe than in the U.S.), as have the rare high-level competitions between men and women. It’s politically incorrect to say so, but there are differences between the sexes, and sometimes those differences manifest themselves in the outcomes of professional sports.
For example, the U.S. women’s team is one of the best women’s teams in the world, and has been ranked in the top three women’s teams internationally for much of the last several decades. But in 2017, an under-15 professional men’s academy team, and an American club’s team at that, beat them 5 to 2. Yes, that’s right: Teenage boys beat the women’s top players in the world, and the result wasn’t even close. That’s not necessarily the women’s team’s fault, and in fact, they didn’t take it as cause for alarm about the team’s abilities. The loss did not mean they the U.S. women weren’t highly skilled. It does illustrate that even the best women’s soccer in the world doesn’t feature the same level of speed, size, strength, and skill as men’s soccer at lower levels. That isn’t sexism, it’s nature.
Men’s teams are generally paid higher in top-level soccer because they bring in substantially larger audiences on average than women’s teams. They also tend to bring in higher revenues — and that includes national teams. It is telling that for 2015, when the U.S. women’s team actually won the World Cup, its revenue was just a bit larger than that of the men’s team, which was in the middle of an off-year.
World Cups are the pinnacle of soccer competition, and so ratings from these tournaments represent a good point of comparison. But it’s also worth noting that there are no women’s pro leagues with the kind of viewership or revenue that even Major League Soccer, which just recently became profitable, brings in.
Almost half the world watched the men’s 2018 World Cup, with nearly 3.6 billion total viewers tuning in to watch some part of the tournament. The final match alone reached an audience of over 1.1 billion people. Subsequently, the tournament’s sponsor, FIFA, brought in a profit of over $6 billion.
The women’s team garners significant but substantially lower viewership. We don’t have data for the 2019 tournament, as it’s currently underway, but during the women’s last World Cup in 2015, 764 million viewers tuned in for some portion of the tournament. This is quite good, but it still pales in comparison to the men’s tournament’s audience. Seeing as professional sports is an entertainment industry, it’s not at all unfair — let alone sexist — to pay teams more if they bring in larger audiences. With an audience five times as large, the men’s World Cup is simply a bigger affair.
Finally, the U.S. Soccer Federation actually pays the women’s team an annual salary. This offers some stability, because again, there are no big-money women’s professional leagues. (The maximum pay in the U.S. league, which you’ve likely never heard of, is under $50,000.) The men don’t receive any salary, but their win bonuses are a lot bigger, such that they can earn a lot more if they find even moderate success. Their bonus for just making a World Cup roster, which the men failed to do in 2018, is larger than the women’s team’s annual salary. But given their potential to generate 10 times as much revenue as the women for achieving the same success, it’s hard to claim there’s some kind of discrimination in the fact that their per-win bonus is larger.
It is probably true that the U.S. women’s soccer team is underpaid relative to what its players are currently achieving. They may deserve a raise. But that doesn’t mean it’s automatically sexist if they make less than what the men make.
